Lights

Beyond the door a dog began to bark anxiously. The engineer Ananyev, his assistant the student von Steinberg, and I went out of the barrack to see whom it was barking at. I was a guest in the barrack and might have stayed inside, but, I confess, the wine I had drunk had made my head spin a little, and I was glad to breathe some fresh air.

“There’s no one there...” said Ananyev, when we had come out. “What are you lying for, Azorka? Fool!”

Not a soul was to be seen around us. The foolish Azorka, a black yard dog, wishing, apparently, to apologize to us for his needless barking, came up to us timidly and wagged his tail. The engineer bent down and touched him between the ears.

“What’s the matter, you creature, barking for nothing?” he said, in the tone in which good-natured people talk to children and dogs. “Had a bad dream, did you? Here, doctor, allow me to recommend him to your attention,” he said, turning to me, “a remarkably nervous subject! Just imagine, he cannot bear solitude, always has terrible dreams and suffers from nightmares, and when you shout at him something like hysterics comes over him.”

“Yes, a delicate dog...” the student confirmed.

Azorka must have understood that the talk was about him; he lifted his muzzle and gave a plaintive whine, as though he wanted to say: “Yes, at times I suffer unbearably, but please, forgive me!”

It was an August night, starry but dark. Because I had never before in my life found myself in such an exceptional setting as the one I had chanced into now, this starry night seemed to me remote, unwelcoming, and darker than it really was. I was on the line of a railway that was still only being built. A high, half-finished embankment, heaps of sand, clay, and crushed stone, barracks, pits, wheelbarrows scattered here and there, flat mounds over the dugouts where the workers lived – all this jumble, painted by the darkness in a single color, gave the earth a strange, wild physiognomy, reminiscent of the ages of chaos. In everything that lay before me there was so little order that amid this hideously dug-up ground, unlike anything else, it was strange to see the silhouettes of men and the slender telegraph poles; both spoiled the ensemble of the picture and seemed not of this world. It was quiet, and one heard only, somewhere very high above our heads, the telegraph humming its tedious song.

We climbed the embankment and from its height looked down at the ground. Some fifty sazhens from us, where the ruts, pits, and heaps merged seamlessly with the night murk, a dim little light flickered. Beyond it glowed another light, beyond that a third, then, some hundred paces farther, two red eyes shone side by side – probably the windows of some barrack – and a long row of such lights, growing thicker and dimmer, stretched along the line to the very horizon, then turned in a semicircle to the left and vanished into the distant murk. The lights were motionless. In them, in the night stillness, and in the doleful song of the telegraph, one felt something in common. It seemed as though some important secret lay buried beneath the embankment, known only to the lights, the night, and the wires...

“What a blessing, Lord!” sighed Ananyev. “Such space and beauty, more than enough to go around! And what an embankment! This, my dear fellow, is no mere embankment, it’s a whole Mont Blanc! Worth millions...”

Admiring the lights and the embankment worth millions, the engineer, grown mellow with wine and sentimental, slapped the student von Steinberg on the shoulder and went on in a jesting tone:

“Well, Mikhailo Mikhailych, lost in thought? It’s pleasant, no doubt, to look on the work of your own hands? Last year on this very spot there was bare steppe, not a whiff of human presence, and now look: life, civilization! And how good it all is, by God! We’re building a railway, you and I, and after us, say in a hundred or two hundred years, good people will put up factories, schools, hospitals here, and – the machine will start humming! Eh?”

The student stood motionless, his hands thrust in his pockets, not taking his eyes off the lights. He was not listening to the engineer, he was thinking about something, and evidently was in that mood when one wants neither to talk nor to listen. After a long silence he turned to me and said quietly:

“Do you know what these endless lights remind me of? They call up in me a notion of something long dead, that lived thousands of years ago, something like a camp of Amalekites or Philistines. Just as though some Old Testament people had pitched camp and were waiting for morning to do battle with Saul or David. For the illusion to be complete, all that’s lacking is the sound of trumpets, and sentries calling to one another in some Ethiopian tongue.”

“Perhaps...” the engineer agreed.

And, as though on purpose, a wind ran along the line and brought a sound like the clashing of weapons. A silence fell. I do not know what the engineer and the student were thinking then, but to me it already seemed that I saw before me something truly long dead, and even heard sentries speaking in an incomprehensible tongue. My imagination hastened to sketch tents, strange people, their clothing, their armor...

“Yes,” the student muttered, lost in thought. “Once, in this world, there lived Philistines and Amalekites, they waged wars, they played their part, and now not a trace of them remains. So it will be with us. Now we are building a railway, standing here philosophizing, and some two thousand years will pass, and of this embankment and of all these people who are now asleep after their hard labor, not even dust will remain. In essence, it’s terrible!”

“Now, drop that sort of thinking...” said the engineer, seriously and admonishingly.

“Why?”

“Because... Such thoughts are fit to end a life with, not to begin one. You’re still too young for them.”

“Why is that?” the student repeated.

“All these thoughts about the transience and nothingness of things, about the aimlessness of life, about the inevitability of death, about the darkness beyond the grave, and so on – all these lofty thoughts, I say, my dear fellow, are good and natural in old age, when they are the product of long inner labor, hard-won, and truly make up a store of intellectual wealth; but for a young mind, which is only just beginning to live independently, they are simply a misfortune! A misfortune!” Ananyev repeated, waving his hand. “To my mind, at your age it’s better to have no head on your shoulders at all than to think in that direction. I’m telling you this seriously, Baron. And I’ve long meant to have a word with you about it, for from the very first day of our acquaintance I noticed in you a leaning toward these accursed thoughts!”

“Good Lord, and why are they accursed?” the student asked, smiling, and by his voice and his face it was plain that he answered only out of simple politeness, and that the argument the engineer was starting did not interest him in the least.

My eyes were closing. I dreamed that right after our walk we would wish each other good night and go to bed, but my dream did not come true so soon. When we returned to the barrack, the engineer put the empty bottles under the bed, took two full ones out of a big wicker box, and, uncorking them, sat down at his worktable with the evident intention of continuing to drink, talk, and work. Sipping now and then from his glass, he made pencil notes on some drawings and went on proving to the student that he was thinking in an improper way. The student sat beside him, checking some figures, and said nothing. Like me, he had no wish either to talk or to listen. So as not to hinder people at their work, and expecting every minute to be offered a bed to lie in, I sat apart from the table on the engineer’s crooked-legged camp bed and was bored. It was past midnight.

Having nothing to do, I observed my new acquaintances. I had never seen either Ananyev or the student before, and had made their acquaintance only that very night. Late in the evening I had been riding back from a fair to the landowner whose guest I was, had taken the wrong road in the dark, and lost my way. Circling near the railway line and seeing the dark night grow thicker, I remembered the “barefoot cast-iron road” that lies in wait for man and horse alike, took fright, and knocked at the first barrack I came upon. There Ananyev and the student met me warmly. As happens with people who are strangers to one another, thrown together by chance, we quickly got acquainted, made friends, and, over tea at first and then over wine, soon felt as though we had known one another for years. Within an hour or so I already knew who they were and how fate had carried them from the capital into this remote steppe, and they knew who I was, what I did, and how I thought.

The engineer Ananyev, Nikolai Anastasyich, was stout, broad in the shoulders, and, to judge by his appearance, was already beginning, like Othello, to “decline into the vale of years” and to grow too stout. He was at that very age which matchmakers call “a man in his full ripeness,” that is, neither young nor old; he liked to eat and drink well and to praise the past, breathed a little heavily when walking, snored loudly in his sleep, and, in his manner with others, already displayed that calm, imperturbable good nature which decent people acquire when they pass into field-officer rank and begin to grow stout. His hair and beard were still far from gray, but he had already, unconsciously, without noticing it himself, taken to addressing young people condescendingly as “my dear fellow” and felt himself, as it were, entitled to scold them good-naturedly for their turn of mind. His movements and his voice were calm, smooth, assured, like those of a man who knows perfectly well that he has already found his proper road, that he has a definite occupation, a definite piece of bread, a definite view of things... His sunburned, thick-nosed face and his muscular neck seemed to say: “I am well fed, healthy, satisfied with myself, and the time will come when you too, young people, will be well fed, healthy, and satisfied with yourselves...” He was dressed in a cotton shirt with a slanted collar and wide linen trousers tucked into big boots. From certain small details, such as, for instance, the colored worsted belt, the embroidered collar, and the little patch on his elbow, I could guess that he was married, and, in all likelihood, tenderly loved by his wife.

Baron von Steinberg, Mikhail Mikhailovich, a student of the Institute of Ways of Communication, was young, some twenty-three or twenty-four years old. Only his light-brown hair and thin little beard, and, perhaps, a certain coarseness and dryness of his features, recalled his descent from the Baltic barons; everything else – his name, his faith, his thoughts, his manners, and the expression of his face – was purely Russian. Dressed, like Ananyev, in a cotton shirt worn loose and big boots, stooped, long unbarbered, sunburned, he resembled not a student, not a baron, but an ordinary Russian journeyman. He spoke and moved little, drank wine reluctantly, without relish, checked his figures mechanically, and all the while seemed to be thinking about something. His movements and his voice too were calm and smooth, but his calm was of quite another kind than the engineer’s. His sunburned, faintly mocking, pensive face, his eyes, which looked out a little from under his brows, and his whole figure expressed a stillness of soul, a laziness of the brain... He looked as though it were a matter of perfect indifference to him whether a light burned before him or not, whether the wine was tasty or repulsive, whether the figures he was checking were correct or not... And on his intelligent, calm face I read: “I see nothing good so far, either in a definite occupation, or in a definite piece of bread, or in a definite view of things. It’s all nonsense. I was in Petersburg, now I’m sitting here in a barrack, from here in the autumn I’ll go back to Petersburg, then in spring here again... What sense will come of all this, I don’t know, and no one knows... So there’s nothing to talk about...”

He listened to the engineer without interest, with the condescending indifference with which senior cadets listen to a good-natured old nanny who has worked himself up. It seemed that everything the engineer said was nothing new to him, and that if he himself were not too lazy to talk, he would have said something newer and cleverer. Ananyev, meanwhile, would not calm down. He had already abandoned his good-natured, jesting tone and was speaking seriously, even with an ardor that did not at all suit his air of calm. Apparently he was not indifferent to abstract questions, he loved them, but did not know how to handle them and was not used to it. And this lack of habit showed so strongly in his speech that I did not at once understand what he wanted.

“With all my soul I hate these thoughts!” he was saying. “I was sick with them myself in my youth, I still haven’t quite got rid of them, and I’ll tell you – perhaps because I’m a fool and these thoughts were not fodder fit for my horse – they’ve brought me nothing but harm. It’s so understandable! Thoughts about the aimlessness of life, about the nothingness and transience of the visible world, Solomon’s ‘vanity of vanities,’ made up and still make up the highest and final rung on the ladder of human thought. The thinker reaches that rung and – stop the engine! There’s nowhere further to go. That’s where the activity of a normal brain comes to a close, which is natural and in the order of things. Our misfortune is that we begin thinking precisely from that end. Where normal people end, we begin. From the very first go, the moment the brain starts its independent work, we climb straight to the topmost, final rung, and don’t want to know the rungs below.”

“And what’s bad about that?” the student asked.

“But do understand, it’s abnormal!” Ananyev cried, looking at him almost with malice. “If we’ve found a way of climbing to the top rung without the help of the lower ones, then the whole long ladder, that is, the whole of life with its colors, its sounds, and its thoughts, loses all meaning for us. That such thinking, at your age, amounts to harm and absurdity, you can see from every step of your reasonable, independent life. Suppose, this very minute, you sit down to read some Darwin or Shakespeare. You’ve barely finished the first page when the poison already begins to tell: both your long life, and Shakespeare, and Darwin seem to you nonsense, absurdity, because you know that you will die, that Shakespeare and Darwin died too, that their thoughts saved neither themselves, nor the earth, nor you, and that if, in this way, life is deprived of meaning, then all this knowledge, this poetry, these lofty thoughts are nothing but a needless amusement, an idle toy of grown-up children. And you stop reading on the second page. Now, suppose, people come to you, as to a clever man, and ask your opinion, say, about war: is it desirable, is it moral or not? In answer to this terrible question you’ll only shrug your shoulders and content yourself with some commonplace, because for you, given your manner of thinking, it’s absolutely all the same whether hundreds of thousands of people die by violence or by their own natural death: in either case the results are the same – dust and oblivion. We’re building a railway, you and I. Why, one asks, should we rack our brains, invent things, rise above the common pattern, spare the workers, steal or not steal, if we know that this road will turn to dust in two thousand years? And so on, and so on... Admit that with such an unfortunate way of thinking no progress is possible, neither in science, nor in art, nor in thought itself. It seems to us we’re cleverer than the crowd and than Shakespeare, but in essence our intellectual work comes to nothing, since we have no wish to descend to the lower rungs, and there’s nowhere higher to go, and so our brain stands frozen at that one point – neither budging forward nor back... I lived under the burden of these thoughts for about six years, and I swear to you before God, in all that time I didn’t read a single worthwhile book, didn’t grow one kopeck’s worth wiser, and didn’t enrich my moral code by a single letter. Isn’t that a misfortune? And what’s more, it’s not only that we poison ourselves, but we bring poison into the lives of those around us. It would be one thing if, with our pessimism, we renounced life, went off into caves or hastened to die, but no, obedient to the general law, we go on living, feeling, loving women, raising children, building roads!”

“Our thoughts make no one either warmer or colder...” said the student reluctantly.

“No, now really – ah, enough of that! You haven’t had a proper sniff of life yet, but once you’ve lived as long as I have, my dear fellow, you’ll learn a thing or two! Our way of thinking isn’t as innocent as you suppose. In practical life, in one’s clashes with people, it leads only to horrors and stupidities. I’ve had to live through situations I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy.”

“For example?” I asked.

“For example?” the engineer repeated; he thought a moment, smiled, and said: “Take, for example, a case like this. Or rather, it’s not a case at all but a whole novel, with a plot and a denouement. A splendid lesson! Ah, what a lesson!”

He poured wine for us and for himself, drank, stroked his broad chest with his palms, and went on, addressing me now more than the student:

“This was in the summer of 187-, soon after the war and after I finished my course. I set off for the Caucasus and stopped over for some five days, passing through, in the seaside town of N. I should tell you that I was born and grew up in that town, and so it’s no wonder that N. seemed to me extraordinarily cozy, warm, and beautiful, though a man from the capital would find life there just as dull and cheerless as in any provincial Chukhloma or Kashira. With sadness I walked past the gymnasium where I had studied, with sadness I strolled through the well-known town garden, made a sad attempt to have a closer look at people I had long not seen but still remembered... All with sadness...

Among other things, one evening I drove out to what’s called the Quarantine. It’s a small, balding little grove, where once, in a forgotten time of plague, there had actually been a quarantine station, and where now summer-cottage people live. To reach it one must drive four versts from town along a good, soft road. As you go, you see: to the left the blue sea, to the right the endless, sullen steppe; the breathing is easy and the eye has room. The little grove itself lies on the seashore. Having let my driver go, I went in through the familiar gate and headed first of all along the avenue to a small stone gazebo I had loved as a child. In my opinion, this round, heavy gazebo on its clumsy columns, combining in itself the lyricism of an old gravestone with the crudeness of a Sobakevich, was the most poetic corner in the whole town. It stood at the edge of the bank, right above the steep drop, and from it the sea was splendidly visible.

I sat down on the bench and, leaning over the railing, looked down. From the gazebo a path ran down the steep, almost sheer bank, past lumps of clay and burdock; where it ended, far below, along the sandy shore, low waves foamed lazily and purred gently. The sea was as majestic, endless, and unwelcoming as it had been seven years before, when, having finished my course at the gymnasium, I left my native town for the capital; far off, a streak of smoke darkened – this was a steamer going by – and, apart from this barely visible, motionless streak and the little terns flickering over the water, nothing enlivened the monotonous picture of sea and sky. To the right and left of the gazebo stretched uneven clay banks...

You know how it is: when a person in a sad mood is left alone with the sea, or in general with a landscape that strikes him as grandiose, for some reason his sadness is always mixed with a conviction that he will live and perish in obscurity, and he reflexively snatches up a pencil and hurries to scratch his name on whatever comes to hand. That’s probably why all lonely, sheltered little corners, like my gazebo, are always covered with pencil marks and cut up with penknives. As I remember now, looking over the railing, I read: ‘Left in remembrance, Ivan Korolkov, 16 May 1876.’ Right beside Korolkov some local dreamer had signed his own name and added: ‘On the shore of desolate waves he stood, full of great thoughts.’ And his handwriting was dreamy, limp, like wet silk. Some fellow named Kross, probably a very small and insignificant little man, had felt his own insignificance so keenly that he had given his penknife free rein and carved his name in letters an inch deep. I mechanically took a pencil out of my pocket and signed my own name on one of the columns too. However, none of that has anything to do with the matter... Forgive me, I don’t know how to tell a story briefly.

I was sad, and a little bored. The boredom, the stillness, and the purring of the waves gradually brought me around to that very sort of thinking we were just talking about. Back then, in the late seventies, it was beginning to come into fashion among the public, and then, in the early eighties, it began gradually passing from the public into literature, science, and politics. I was no more than twenty-six at the time, but I already knew perfectly well that life is aimless and has no meaning, that everything is deception and illusion, that in essence and in its results a convict’s life on the island of Sakhalin is no different from a life in Nice, that the difference between the brain of Kant and the brain of a fly has no essential significance, that no one in this world is either right or guilty, that it’s all rubbish and nonsense, and that the whole thing can go to the devil! I lived, and it was as if I were doing a favor by it to some unknown force that compelled me to live: there, look, force, I hold life at nothing, and yet I live! I thought in one fixed direction, but in every possible variation, and in this respect I resembled that subtle gourmet who knew how to make a hundred tasty dishes out of a single potato. Doubtless I was one-sided and even, to some degree, narrow, but it seemed to me then that my mental horizon had neither beginning nor end and that my thought was as wide as the sea. Well, sir, as far as I can judge by myself, this sort of thinking has in its essence something addictive, narcotic, like tobacco or morphine. It becomes a habit, a need. Every minute of solitude and every convenient occasion you use to indulge yourself voluptuously in thoughts about aimless life and the darkness beyond the grave. As I sat in the gazebo, some Greek children with long noses were walking sedately along the avenue. I took advantage of this convenient occasion and, glancing at them, began to think along these lines: ‘Why, one wonders, are these very children born and living? Is there so much as a trace of meaning in their existence? They’ll grow up, without themselves knowing why, live out their lives in this backwater for no reason at all, and die...’

And I even felt a kind of vexation at these children, because they walked so sedately and talked so solemnly about something, as if they truly valued their small, colorless lives not so cheaply, and knew what they were living for... I remember, far off at the end of the avenue three female figures appeared. Some young ladies – one in pink, two in white – were walking side by side, arm in arm, talking about something and laughing. Following them with my eyes, I thought: ‘It would be nice now, out of boredom, to spend a couple of days with some woman here!’

I recalled, incidentally, that it had been three weeks since I’d last seen my lady friend in Petersburg, and I thought that a fleeting affair would suit me very nicely just now. The middle young lady, the one in white, seemed younger and prettier than her friends, and, judging by her manners and her laugh, was a gymnasium girl in her senior class. Not without impure thoughts I looked at her bosom, and at the same time thought about her: ‘She’ll learn music and manners, marry some, God forgive me, Greek pindos-fellow, live out a dull and stupid life, without any purpose at all, bear, without herself knowing why, a pile of children, and die. An absurd life!’

In general, I should say, I was a master at combining my lofty thoughts with the basest prose. Thoughts about the darkness beyond the grave did not prevent me from paying due tribute to bosoms and ankles. Our dear baron here, his high-grade thoughts don’t in the least prevent him, either, from riding out to Vukolovka on Saturdays and making his Don Juan raids there. To speak frankly, so far as I can remember myself, my relations with women were of the most insulting sort. Just now, recalling that gymnasium girl, I blushed for my thoughts of that time, but back then my conscience was perfectly at ease. I, the son of respectable parents, a Christian with a higher education, by nature neither wicked nor stupid, felt not the slightest unease when I paid women what the Germans call Blutgeld, or when I saw gymnasium girls off with insulting looks... The trouble is that youth has its rights, and our way of thinking, in principle, has nothing against those rights, whether they’re good or repulsive. Whoever knows that life is aimless and death inevitable is quite indifferent to the struggle against nature and to the notion of sin: fight it or don’t fight it – you’ll die and rot all the same... Secondly, gentlemen, our way of thinking instills even in very young people what’s called rationality. The predominance of reason over the heart with us is overwhelming. Direct feeling, inspiration – all of it smothered by petty analysis. And where there’s rationality, there’s coldness, and cold people – no use denying the sin – know nothing of chastity. That virtue is familiar only to those who are warm, who have heart, and who are capable of love. Thirdly, our way of thinking, by denying the meaning of life, thereby denies the meaning of every separate person too. It’s understandable that if I deny the personhood of some Natalya Stepanovna, then it’s a matter of complete indifference to me whether she’s been insulted or not. Today I insult her human dignity, pay her Blutgeld, and tomorrow I don’t even remember her.”

“So there I sat in the gazebo, watching the young ladies. On the avenue appeared yet another female figure, her fair head bare, a white knitted shawl on her shoulders. She strolled along the avenue, then went into the gazebo and, taking hold of the railing, looked down indifferently, and then out to sea, into the distance. Coming in, she paid no attention to me whatsoever, as if she hadn’t even noticed me. I looked her over from head to foot (not from foot to head, as one looks over men) and found that she was young, no more than twenty-five, comely, well built, in all likelihood no longer a young lady but belonging to the class of married women. She was dressed simply, at home, but fashionably and with taste, the way all the cultivated ladies of N. dress in general.

‘Now here’s one to take up with...’ I thought, looking over her handsome waist and arms. ‘Not bad at all... Must be the wife of some Aesculapius or gymnasium teacher...’

But to take up with her, that is, to make her the heroine of one of those impromptu novels that tourists are so partial to, was not easy and hardly even possible. I felt this the moment I looked closely at her face. She looked, and had such an expression, as if the sea, the distant smoke, and the sky had long since bored and wearied her eyes; she seemed tired, bored, thinking about something not very cheerful, and on her face there was not even that vain, strained-indifferent look that appears on almost every woman’s face when she feels the presence nearby of an unfamiliar man.

The fair-haired woman glanced at me fleetingly and with boredom, sat down on the bench, and fell to thinking about something, and by her glance I understood that she had no time for me, and that I, with my capital-city face, had not aroused in her so much as simple curiosity. But I resolved to speak to her all the same, and asked:

“Madam, allow me to ask, at what hour do the coaches leave here for town?”

“I believe at ten, or eleven...”

I thanked her. She glanced at me once or twice, and on her impassive face there flickered suddenly a look of curiosity, then something like astonishment... I hastened to give myself an indifferent expression and assume a suitable pose: it’s biting! As though something had stung her painfully, she suddenly rose from the bench, smiled meekly, and, hurriedly looking me over, asked timidly:

“Listen, aren’t you, by chance, Ananyev?”

“Yes, I’m Ananyev...” I answered.

“And you don’t recognize me? No?”

I was a little embarrassed, looked at her closely, and, if you can believe it, recognized her not by her face, not by her figure, but by her meek, tired smile. This was Natalya Stepanovna, or, as she was called, Kisochka – the same one I had been head over heels in love with seven or eight years before, when I still wore the gymnasium uniform. Deeds of days long gone, legends of deep antiquity... I remember this Kisochka as a small, thin schoolgirl of fifteen or sixteen, when she embodied something in the gymnasium taste, created by nature specially for platonic love. What a lovely girl she was! Pale, fragile, light – it seemed you had only to blow on her and she would fly off like down, straight up to the sky – a meek, bewildered face, small little hands, hair long down to her waist, soft, a waist slender as a wasp’s – in a word, something ethereal, transparent, like moonlight, in short, from a schoolboy’s point of view, indescribable beauty... I was in love with her – how I was! Didn’t sleep nights, wrote verses... In the evenings, as it happened, she would sit on a bench in the town garden, and we schoolboys would crowd around her and gaze at her in reverence... In answer to all our compliments, poses, and sighs, she would give a nervous little shiver at the evening damp, screw up her eyes, and smile meekly, and at such moments she looked terribly like a pretty little kitten; whenever we gazed at her, every one of us felt the urge to caress her and stroke her, like a cat – hence the nickname Kisochka, Kitty.

In the seven or eight years we hadn’t seen each other, Kisochka had changed a great deal. She had grown more mannish, fuller, and had entirely lost her resemblance to a soft, downy kitten. Her features had not so much aged or faded as grown dim and severe, her hair seemed shorter, her stature taller, her shoulders almost twice as broad, and, above all, her face already wore that expression of motherhood and submissiveness one sees in decent women of her age, and which, of course, I had never seen in her before... In a word, of the former schoolgirl, platonic Kisochka, only the meek smile remained, and nothing more...

We fell to talking. Learning that I was now an engineer, Kisochka was terribly delighted.

“How splendid that is!” she said, looking joyfully into my eyes. “Ah, how splendid! And what fine fellows you all turned out to be! Not a single failure out of your whole graduating class, every one of you made something of himself. One’s an engineer, another a doctor, a third a teacher, a fourth, they say, is now a famous singer in Petersburg... All of you, all fine fellows! Ah, how splendid that is!”

In Kisochka’s eyes shone sincere joy and goodwill. She admired me the way an elder sister or a former teacher might. And I looked at her dear face and thought: ‘It would be nice to take up with her today!’

“Do you remember, Natalya Stepanovna,” I asked, “how once in the garden I brought you a bouquet with a little note? You read my note and such bewilderment spread over your face...”

“No, I don’t remember that,” she said, laughing. “But I do remember how you wanted to challenge Florens to a duel over me...”

“Well now, that I don’t remember, if you can believe it...”

“Yes, what’s past is past...” Kisochka sighed. “Once I was a little idol to you, and now it’s come round to my turn to look up at all of you from below...”

From our further talk I learned that Kisochka, some two years after finishing her course at the gymnasium, had married a local resident, half Greek, half Russian, employed either at a bank or an insurance company, and at the same time engaged in the wheat trade. His surname was something convoluted, something like Populaki or Skarandopulo... The devil knows, I’ve forgotten... In general Kisochka spoke little and unwillingly about herself. The talk was entirely about me. She questioned me about the institute, about my schoolmates, about Petersburg, about my plans, and everything I said aroused in her a lively joy and the exclamation: ‘Ah, how splendid that is!’

We went down to the sea, walked along the sand, then, when the evening dampness began to blow off the sea, went back up. The whole time the talk was about me and about the past. We walked until the reflections of the evening glow began to go out in the windows of the summer cottages.

“Come and have tea with me,” Kisochka suggested. “The samovar must have been on the table a long while... I’m home alone,” she said, as her cottage showed through the green of the acacias. “My husband is always in town and comes back only at night, and not even every day at that, and I, I confess, am so bored it’s simply death.”

I walked behind her, admiring her back and her shoulders. It pleased me that she was married. For fleeting affairs a married woman offers more suitable material than a young lady. It pleased me too that her husband wasn’t at home... But at the same time I felt that there would be no affair...

We went into the house. Kisochka’s rooms were small, with low ceilings, the furniture of the summer-cottage sort (and at summer cottages the Russian likes uncomfortable, heavy, dingy furniture, which is a pity to throw out and nowhere to put), but from certain small details one could still tell that Kisochka and her husband did not live poorly, and spent some five or six thousand a year. I remember, in the middle of the room Kisochka called the dining room stood a round table, for some reason on six legs, on it a samovar and cups, and at the edge of the table lay an open book, a pencil, and a notebook. I glanced into the book and recognized it as Malinin and Burenin’s arithmetic problem book. It was open, as I recall now, to ‘the rules of partnership.’

“Who are you studying with?” I asked Kisochka.

“With no one...” she answered. “It’s just me, on my own... Out of boredom, with nothing to do, I recall the old days, solve problems.”

“Do you have children?”

“I had one boy, but he lived a week and died.”

We began drinking tea. Admiring me, Kisochka spoke again of how splendid it was that I was an engineer, and how glad she was of my successes. And the more she talked and the more sincerely she smiled, the stronger grew my conviction that I would leave her with nothing to show for it. I was already, by then, something of a specialist in the matter of affairs, and knew how to weigh accurately my chances of success or failure. You can count boldly on success if you’re hunting a fool, or an adventuress after sensations just like yourself, or a woman on the make, to whom you’re a matter of indifference. But if you meet a woman who is not stupid and is serious, whose face expresses a weary submissiveness and goodwill, who is sincerely glad of your presence, and, above all, respects you, then you may as well turn your carriage around. To succeed there requires a longer term than a single day.

And Kisochka, in the evening light, seemed even more interesting than by day. I liked her more and more, and I too, it seemed, was agreeable to her. And the setting, too, was the most suitable for an affair: no husband at home, no servants in sight, all around us silence... However little I believed in success, I resolved all the same, just in case, to begin the attack. First of all I had to shift onto a familiar tone and change Kisochka’s lyrically serious mood to something lighter...

“Let’s change the subject, Natalya Stepanovna,” I began. “Let’s talk of something cheerful... First of all, allow me, for old times’ sake, to call you Kisochka.”

She allowed it.

“Tell me, please, Kisochka,” I went on, “what fly has bitten the whole fair sex around here? What’s come over them? Before, everyone was so moral, so virtuous, and now, if you please, whoever you ask about, they say such things that one’s simply afraid for the human race... One young lady ran off with an officer, another ran off and carried a schoolboy along with her, a third, a married woman, left her husband for an actor, a fourth left her husband for an officer, and so on, and so on... A regular epidemic! At this rate, before long there won’t be a single young lady or a single young wife left in your town!”

I spoke in a vulgar, flirtatious tone. Had Kisochka laughed in reply, I would have gone on in the same style: ‘Oh, watch out, Kisochka, or some officer or actor will carry you off here too!’ She would have lowered her eyes and said: ‘Who’d want to carry off someone like me? There are younger and prettier ones...’ And I would have said: ‘Come now, Kisochka, I’d be the very first, with the greatest pleasure, to carry you off!’ And so on in that vein, and in the end my business would have been as good as done. But in answer to me Kisochka did not laugh; on the contrary, her face turned serious and she sighed.

“All that they say is true...” she said. “My cousin Sonya left her husband for an actor. Of course, that’s not good... Every person must bear what fate has laid on them, but I don’t condemn them and I don’t blame them... Circumstances are sometimes stronger than a person!”

“That’s so, Kisochka, but what circumstances could have bred a whole epidemic?”

“It’s very simple and understandable...” Kisochka said, raising her eyebrows. “With us, educated girls and women have absolutely nowhere to go. Not every one of them can go off to courses, or become a schoolteacher, in general live by ideas and purposes, the way men do. One has to marry... But whom, if you please? You boys finish your course at the gymnasium and go off to the university, never to return to your home town again, and marry in the capitals, while the girls are left behind!.. Whom, then, are they to marry? Well, for want of decent, developed people, they marry God knows whom, various brokers and pindos-fellows, who know how to do nothing but drink and make scenes at the club... The girls marry just anyhow, for no reason at all... And what kind of life comes of that afterward? You understand yourself, an educated, well-brought-up woman lives with a stupid, oppressive man; some intelligent man crosses her path, an officer, an actor, or a doctor, well, she falls in love, life becomes unbearable for her, and she runs from her husband. And one can’t condemn her for it!”

“If that’s so, Kisochka, then why marry at all?” I asked.

“Of course,” Kisochka sighed, “but every girl thinks that even some husband is better than none at all... In general, Nikolai Anastasyich, life here is not good, very much not good! It’s stifling for the unmarried, and it’s stifling married too... Here they laugh at Sonya for running off, and with an actor at that, but if they looked into her soul, they wouldn’t be laughing.”

Beyond the door Azorka began barking again. He snarled angrily at something, then howled with anguish and flung his whole body against the wall of the barrack... Ananyev’s face wrinkled with pity; he broke off his story and went out. For a couple of minutes one could hear him comforting the dog beyond the door: “Good dog! Poor dog!”

“Our Nikolai Anastasyich does love to talk,” said von Steinberg, smiling. “A good man!” he added, after a moment’s silence.

Returning to the barrack, the engineer topped up our glasses, and, smiling, stroking his chest, went on:

“And so, my attack had failed. There was nothing to be done, I set aside my impure thoughts for a more favorable occasion, made my peace with my failure, and, as they say, waved it off. What’s more, under the influence of Kisochka’s voice, the evening air, and the stillness, I myself, little by little, fell into a quiet, lyrical mood. I remember, I sat in an armchair by the wide-open window, looking at the trees and the darkening sky. The silhouettes of the acacias and lindens were the very same as eight years before; just as then, in my childhood days, somewhere far off a bad piano was tinkling, the public still had the same habit of strolling up and down the avenues, but the people were not the same. It was no longer I, not my schoolmates, not the objects of my passion, walking along the avenues, but some strange schoolboys, strange young ladies. And I grew sad. And when to my inquiries about old acquaintances I got the answer ‘dead’ from Kisochka five times in a row, my sadness turned into the feeling one has at a memorial service for a good man. And I, sitting there by the window, watching the strolling public and listening to the tinkling piano, for the first time in my life saw with my own eyes with what greed one generation hurries to replace another, and what a fateful significance even some seven or eight years can have in a person’s life!

Kisochka set a bottle of Santorini wine on the table. I drank, grew maudlin, and began telling some long story or other. Kisochka listened and, as before, admired me and my intelligence. And time passed. The sky had already grown so dark that the silhouettes of the acacias and lindens merged into one, the public no longer strolled along the avenues, the piano had fallen silent, and only the even noise of the sea could be heard.

Young people are all the same. Coddle a young man, pet him, treat him to wine, let him understand that he’s interesting, and he’ll settle in, forget that it’s time to leave, and go on talking, talking, talking... His hosts’ eyes are closing, it’s time for them to sleep, and there he sits still talking. So it was with me. Once I glanced by chance at my watch: it was half past ten. I began saying my goodbyes.

“Have one for the road,” said Kisochka. I drank one for the road, started in again on a long story, forgot it was time to go, and sat back down. But then men’s voices were heard, footsteps, and the jingling of spurs. Some people passed under the windows and stopped by the door.

“It seems my husband’s come back...” said Kisochka, listening.

The door clicked, voices sounded already in the entryway, and I saw two men pass by the door leading to the dining room: one – a stout, solid brunet with a hooked nose and a straw hat, and the other – a young officer in a white tunic. Passing the door, both of them glanced indifferently and fleetingly at me and Kisochka, and it seemed to me that both were drunk.

“So she lied to you, and you believed her!” a loud voice rang out a minute later, with a strong nasal twang. “In the first place, it wasn’t in the big club, it was in the small one.”

“You’re a real Jupiter when you get angry, which means you’re in the wrong...” said another voice, laughing and coughing, evidently the officer’s. “Listen, can I stay the night at your place? Tell me honestly, I won’t be in your way?”

“What a question! Not only can you, you must. What’ll you have, beer or wine?”

The two of them sat two rooms away from us, talking loudly and, evidently, taking no interest either in Kisochka or in her guest. But a noticeable change had come over Kisochka the moment her husband returned. She first flushed, then her face took on a timid, guilty expression; a kind of uneasiness came over her, and it began to seem to me that she was ashamed to let me see her husband and wanted me to leave.

I began saying goodbye. Kisochka saw me to the porch. I remember perfectly her meek, sad smile and her tender, submissive eyes, when she shook my hand and said:

“We shall probably never see each other again... Well, God grant you everything good. Thank you!”

Not a single sigh, not a single phrase more. Saying goodbye, she held a candle in her hands; bright spots leapt across her face and neck, as though chasing after her sad smile; I pictured to myself the Kisochka of old, whom one used to want to stroke like a cat, looked closely at the Kisochka of now, and for some reason recalled her words: ‘Every person must bear what fate has laid on them’ – and my heart grew heavy. My instinct guessed, and my conscience whispered to me, happy and indifferent as I was, that before me stood a good, kindly, loving, but worn-out human being...

I bowed and went out to the gate. It was already dark. In July, in the south, evening comes early and the air darkens quickly. By ten o’clock it’s usually so dark you can’t see your hand in front of your face. By the time I groped my way almost blindly to the gate, I’d burned through a couple dozen matches.

“Driver!” I shouted, coming out through the gate; in answer to me not a voice, not a sigh... “Driver!” I repeated. “Hey! Coaches!”

But there were no drivers, no coaches. Dead silence. All I hear is the sleepy sea rustling and my own heart pounding from the Santorini wine. I raise my eyes to the sky – not a single star there. Dark and overcast. Clearly the sky is covered in clouds. For no reason I shrug my shoulders, smile foolishly, and, less resolutely now, call for a driver once more.

“Osh!” the echo answers me.

Walking four versts across open country on foot, and in the dark besides – an unpleasant prospect. Before making up my mind to walk, I ponder for a long while and call for a driver, then shrug my shoulders and, without any particular purpose, lazily go back into the grove. In the grove it’s terribly dark. Here and there, among the trees, the windows of the summer people show dimly red. A crow, roused by my footsteps and startled by the matches with which I light my way to the gazebo, flies from tree to tree and rustles in the foliage. I feel both vexed and ashamed, and the crow seems to understand this and taunt me – kaaw! Vexed, that I’ll have to walk; ashamed, that at Kisochka’s I ran on so, like a boy.

I made my way to the gazebo, felt for the bench, and sat down. Far below, beyond the thick darkness, the sea murmured quietly and angrily. I remember, blind as it were, I saw neither the sea nor the sky, nor even the gazebo I was sitting in, and it already seemed to me that the whole of this world consisted only of the thoughts wandering in my wine-fuddled head, and of an invisible force, monotonously roaring somewhere below. And then, when I began to doze, it seemed to me that it wasn’t the sea roaring, but my own thoughts, and that the whole world consisted of myself alone. And, having thus gathered the whole world into myself, I forgot about drivers, and about the town, and about Kisochka, and gave myself over to a sensation I loved dearly. This is the sensation of terrible solitude, when it seems to you that in the whole universe, dark and formless, you alone exist. A proud, demonic sensation, accessible only to Russian people, whose thoughts and feelings are as broad, boundless, and stern as their plains, their forests, their snows. If I were a painter, I would certainly capture the expression on a Russian’s face when he sits motionless, legs drawn up under him, his head clasped in his hands, given over to that sensation... And alongside that sensation, thoughts of an aimless life, of death, of the darkness beyond the grave... thoughts not worth a copper coin, but the expression on his face, it must be beautiful...

While I sat there dozing, in no hurry to rise – I was warm and at peace – suddenly, amid the even, monotonous noise of the sea, as though on a canvas, sounds began to stand out, drawing my attention away from myself... Someone was walking hurriedly along the avenue. Coming up to the gazebo, this someone stopped, gave a sob like a little girl, and asked, in the voice of a weeping girl:

“My God, when, at last, will all this end? Lord!”

Judging by the voice and the weeping, this was a girl of ten or twelve. She entered the gazebo hesitantly, sat down, and began, half praying, half complaining, aloud...

“Lord!” she said, drawing out the words, weeping. “It’s simply unbearable! No patience could stand it! I bear it, I keep silent, but do understand, I too want to live... Ah, my God, my God!”

And all in that vein... I felt a wish to look at the girl and speak with her. So as not to frighten her, I first sighed loudly and coughed, then carefully struck a match... A bright light flashed in the darkness and lit up the one who had been weeping. It was Kisochka.”

“What a wonder!” sighed von Steinberg. “A black night, the noise of the sea, her suffering, him with his sense of universal solitude... the devil knows what! All that’s missing is Circassians with daggers.”

“I’m not telling you a fairy tale, I’m telling you what actually happened.”

“Well, suppose it did actually happen... It all comes to nothing anyway, and it’s all been known for ages...”

“Hold off on your scorn, let me finish!” said Ananyev, waving his hand in annoyance. “Don’t interrupt, please! I’m not telling this to you, I’m telling it to the doctor...” “Well, sir,” he went on, turning to me and glancing sidelong at the student, who had bent over his figures again and seemed very pleased at having managed to needle the engineer. “Well, sir, seeing me, Kisochka wasn’t surprised and wasn’t frightened, as though she had known beforehand that she’d find me in the gazebo. She was breathing in gasps and trembling all over, as if in a fever, and her face, wet with tears, as far as I could make out, striking match after match, was no longer the former intelligent, submissive, weary face, but some other face, one I still, to this day, cannot make out. It expressed neither pain, nor unease, nor anguish, nothing of what her words and her tears expressed... I confess, probably because I did not understand it, it seemed to me senseless, and drunken.

“I can’t go on...” Kisochka began muttering, in the voice of a weeping girl. “I haven’t the strength, Nikolai Anastasyich! Forgive me, Nikolai Anastasyich... I’m not able to live like this... I’ll go into town, to my mother’s... See me there... For God’s sake, see me there!”

In the presence of people weeping, I never knew how either to speak or to be silent. I lost my head and, to comfort her, muttered some nonsense.

“No, no, I’ll go to my mother!” said Kisochka resolutely, rising and convulsively seizing my hand (her hands and her sleeves were wet with tears). “Forgive me, Nikolai Anastasyich, I’ll go... I can’t bear it any longer...”

“But Kisochka, there isn’t a single driver to be had!” I said. “What will you go on?”

“Never mind, I’ll walk... It’s not far from here. And I can’t bear it any longer...”

I was embarrassed, but not moved. To me, in Kisochka’s tears, in her trembling, and in the dull expression on her face, there was something of an unserious French or Little Russian melodrama, where every grain of cheap, empty grief comes drenched in a pood of tears. I did not understand her, and knew that I did not understand her; I ought to have kept silent, but for some reason, probably so that my silence would not be taken for stupidity, I felt it necessary to talk her out of going to her mother’s and to persuade her to stay home. Women who weep don’t like to be seen weeping. And there I was, striking match after match, one after another, until the box was empty. Why I needed that ungenerous illumination, I still, to this day, cannot understand. In general, cold people are often clumsy, even foolish.

In the end Kisochka took my arm and we set off. Going out through the gate, we turned right and wandered, unhurried, along the soft, dusty road. It was dark; but as my eyes gradually grew used to the darkness, I began to make out the silhouettes of old but scrawny oaks and lindens that grew along the sides of the road. Soon, to the right, there vaguely showed itself a black strip of uneven, precipitous shore, cut here and there by small, deep ravines and washouts. Around the ravines huddled low bushes, looking like people sitting down. It grew eerie. I glanced suspiciously at the shore, and already the noise of the sea and the stillness of the fields were unpleasantly frightening my imagination. Kisochka was silent. She did not stop trembling and, before we had gone half a verst, was already worn out with walking and short of breath. I too was silent.

A verst from the Quarantine stands an abandoned four-story building with a very tall chimney, in which there had once been a steam flour mill. It stands alone on the shore, and by day it can be seen far off, both from the sea and from the fields. Because it is abandoned and no one lives in it, and because an echo lodges in it and repeats distinctly the footsteps and voices of passers-by, it seems mysterious. And now imagine me, on a dark night, arm in arm with a woman running from her husband, near this long and lofty hulk, which repeats every one of my steps and stares at me motionless with its hundred black windows. A normal young man, in such a setting, would have fallen into romanticism, but I looked at the dark windows and thought: ‘All this is impressive, but the time will come when of this building too, and of Kisochka with her grief, and of me with my thoughts, not even dust will remain... It’s all nonsense and vanity...’

When we drew level with the mill, Kisochka suddenly stopped, freed her arm, and began to speak, but no longer in the voice of a girl – in her own voice:

“Nikolai Anastasyich, I know all this seems strange to you. But I am dreadfully unhappy! And you cannot even imagine how unhappy I am! It’s impossible to imagine! I don’t tell you about it, because it can’t even be told... Such a life, such a life...”

Kisochka did not finish, clenched her teeth, and groaned, as though straining with all her might not to cry out from pain.

“Such a life!” she repeated, with horror, in a sing-song voice, with that southern, faintly Little Russian accent, which, especially in women, gives excited speech the character of a song. “Such a life! Ah, my God, my God, what is all this? Ah, my God, my God!”

As though wishing to unriddle the mystery of her own life, she shrugged her shoulders in bewilderment, shook her head, and wrung her hands. She spoke as though singing, moved gracefully and beautifully, and reminded me of a certain famous Little Russian actress.

“Lord, I’m as if in a pit!” she went on, wringing her hands. “If only I could live one little minute in joy, the way other people live! Ah, my God, my God! I’ve come to such shame that, in front of a stranger, I’m running away from my husband at night, like some wanton woman. What good can be expected after this?”

Admiring her movements and her voice, I suddenly began to feel a certain pleasure at the fact that she was not living happily with her husband. ‘It would be nice to take up with her!’ flashed through my mind, and that merciless thought settled in my brain and did not leave me the whole way, smiling at me ever more broadly...

Having gone about a verst and a half from the mill, one must turn left toward town, past the cemetery. At the turning, at the corner of the cemetery, stands a stone windmill, and beside it a little hut where the miller lives. We passed the mill and the hut, turned left, and came to the cemetery gates. Here Kisochka stopped and said:

“I’ll go back, Nikolai Anastasyich! You go on with God, and I’ll go back on my own. I’m not afraid.”

“Now, none of that!” I said, alarmed. “If we’re going, we’re going...”

“I flared up for nothing... It all came from a trifle, really. You, with your talk, reminded me of the past, set all sorts of thoughts going in my head... I was sad and wanted to cry, and my husband said something rude to me in front of the officer, and, well, I couldn’t bear it... And why should I go into town, to my mother’s? Will that make me any happier? I ought to go back... But then again... let’s go on!” said Kisochka, and laughed. ‘It’s all the same!’

I remembered that over the cemetery gates there’s an inscription: ‘The hour cometh, in the which all that are in the graves shall hear the voice of the Son of God,’ and I knew perfectly well that sooner or later a time would come when both I and Kisochka and her husband and the officer in the white tunic would be lying behind that fence under the dark trees, I knew that beside me walked an unhappy, insulted human being – all this I was clearly aware of, and yet at the same time I was troubled by a heavy, unpleasant fear that Kisochka would turn back and that I would not manage to say to her what needed to be said. Never at any other time in my life have thoughts of the highest order been so closely entangled with the basest, most animal prose, as on that night... It’s dreadful!

Not far from the cemetery we found a driver. Reaching Bolshaya Street, where Kisochka’s mother lived, we let the driver go and walked along the pavement. Kisochka was silent the whole time, and I looked at her and raged at myself: ‘Well, why aren’t you beginning? It’s time!’ Twenty paces from the hotel where I was staying, Kisochka stopped by a lamppost and began to cry.

“Nikolai Anastasyich!” she said, crying, laughing, and looking into my face with wet, shining eyes. “I’ll never forget your kindness to me... What a good man you are! And all of you are such fine fellows! Honest, generous, warm-hearted, clever... Ah, how splendid that is!”

She saw in me an intelligent and, in every respect, progressive man, and on her wet, laughing face, alongside the tenderness and rapture that my person aroused in her, was written the grief that she so rarely met such people, and that God had not granted her the happiness of being the wife of one of them. She muttered: ‘Ah, how splendid that is!’ The childlike joy on her face, the tears, the meek smile, the soft hair that had come loose from under her shawl, and the shawl itself, thrown carelessly over her head, in the light of the lamppost brought back to me the Kisochka of old, whom one had wanted to stroke like a cat...

I could not restrain myself, and began to stroke her hair, her shoulders, her arms...

“Kisochka, well, what is it you want?” I began muttering. “Do you want me to go with you to the ends of the earth? I’ll take you out of this pit and give you happiness. I love you... Shall we go, my darling? Yes? Is it good?”

Bewilderment spread over Kisochka’s face. She stepped back from the lamppost and, stunned, looked at me with wide eyes. I seized her hand firmly, began covering her face, her neck, her shoulders with kisses, and went on swearing oaths and making promises. In matters of love, oaths and promises make up almost a physiological necessity. There’s no getting by without them. Sometimes you know you’re lying and that the promises are unnecessary, and yet you swear and promise all the same. The bewildered Kisochka kept backing away and looking at me with wide eyes...

“Don’t! Don’t!” she began to murmur, pushing me away with her hands.

I embraced her tightly. She suddenly burst into hysterical tears, and her face took on the same senseless, dull expression I had seen in the gazebo, when I had been striking matches... Without asking her consent, cutting off her words, I dragged her by force to my hotel... She was as though stupefied and would not walk, but I took her by the arm and almost carried her... I remember, as we went up the stairs, some figure with a red cap band looked at me in surprise and bowed to Kisochka...”

Ananyev flushed and fell silent. He paced around the table without speaking, scratched the back of his head in vexation, and several times convulsively shrugged his shoulders and shoulder blades against a chill that ran down his broad back. He was already ashamed and found it hard to remember, and he struggled with himself...

“Not good!” he said, drinking off a glass of wine and shaking his head. “They say that in every introductory lecture on women’s diseases, medical students are advised, before undressing and examining a sick woman, to remember that each of them has a mother, a sister, a bride... That advice would do not only for doctors, but for everyone who, one way or another, has to deal with women in life. Now, with a wife and a little daughter of my own, ah, how I understand that advice! How I understand it, my God! However, listen to what came next...” “Once she’d become my mistress, Kisochka looked at the matter quite differently than I did. First of all, she fell passionately and deeply in love. What for me made up an ordinary love-affair on impulse, for her was a whole revolution in her life. I remember, it seemed to me that she had lost her mind. Happy for the first time in her life, grown five years younger, her face inspired and rapturous, not knowing where to put herself for happiness, she alternated between laughing and crying, and did not stop dreaming aloud of how tomorrow we would go off to the Caucasus, from there in autumn to Petersburg, how we would live afterward...

“And don’t you worry about my husband!” she reassured me. “He’s bound to give me a divorce. The whole town knows he’s living with the elder Kostovich girl. We’ll get a divorce and marry.”

Women, when they’re in love, adapt to a place and get used to people quickly, like cats. Kisochka had been in my room for no more than an hour and a half, and already felt at home in it, and disposed of my belongings as if they were her own. She packed my things into my suitcase, scolded me for not hanging my new, expensive overcoat on the nail but throwing it on a chair like a rag, and so on.

I watched her, listened, and felt weariness and vexation. It rather disgusted me to think that a decent, honest, suffering woman had become the mistress of the first man she met so easily, in a matter of some three or four hours. That, you see, did not sit well with me, decent fellow that I was. Then, too, it acted on me unpleasantly that women like Kisochka are shallow and unserious, love life too much, and elevate even such a trifle, in essence, as love for a man, to the level of happiness, of suffering, of a revolution in one’s life... And besides, now that I was sated, I was vexed with myself for having been foolish enough to get tangled up with a woman I would inevitably have to deceive... And I, I must note, for all my dissoluteness, could not bear to lie.

I remember, Kisochka sat at my feet, laid her head on my knees, and, gazing at me with shining, loving eyes, asked:

“Kolya, do you love me? Very much? Very much?”

And laughed from happiness... This struck me as sentimental, cloying, and unintelligent, and yet I was already in that state of mind when, in everything, I was looking first of all for ‘depth of thought.’

“Kisochka, you ought to go home,” I said, “or your family, God forbid, will start missing you and looking for you all over town. And it’s awkward, too, that you’ll be coming to your mother’s toward morning...”

Kisochka agreed with me. As we parted, we arranged that the next day at noon I would see her in the town garden, and the day after we would go together to Pyatigorsk. I went out to see her to the street and, I remember, caressed her tenderly and sincerely on the way. There was a moment when I suddenly found it unbearably pitiful that she believed in me so recklessly, and I resolved, for an instant, to take her with me to Pyatigorsk, but, remembering that I had only six hundred rubles in my suitcase, and that come autumn it would be far harder to part with her than now, I hastened to stifle my pity.

We came to the house where Kisochka’s mother lived. I pulled the bell. When footsteps sounded behind the door, Kisochka suddenly made a serious face, glanced up at the sky, and hurriedly crossed me several times, as one would a child, then seized my hand and pressed it to her lips.

“Till tomorrow!” she said, and vanished behind the door.

I crossed to the opposite pavement and from there looked back at the house. At first the windows were dark, then in one of them there flickered a faint bluish light, a candle just lit; the light grew, sent out its rays, and I saw shadows moving through the rooms along with it.

‘Wasn’t expected!’ I thought.

Returning to my room, I undressed, drank some Santorini wine, had a bite of fresh caviar I’d bought that day at the market, unhurriedly lay down in bed, and fell into the sound, untroubled sleep of a tourist.

In the morning I woke with a headache and in low spirits. Something was bothering me.

‘What’s the matter?’ I asked myself, wanting to explain my uneasiness. ‘What’s troubling me?’

And I explained my uneasiness by the fear that Kisochka might, perhaps, come to me any moment, keep me from leaving, and I would have to lie and play a part in front of her. I dressed quickly, packed my things, and left the hotel, having ordered the porter to deliver my luggage to the station by seven in the evening. The whole day I spent at a doctor friend’s, and by evening I had already left the town. As you see, my way of thinking did not prevent me from breaking into a base, treacherous flight...

The whole time I was sitting at my friend’s, and afterward riding to the station, uneasiness tormented me. It seemed to me that I was afraid of meeting Kisochka and of a scandal. At the station I purposely sat in the lavatory until the second bell, and when I made my way to my carriage, a feeling weighed on me as though, from head to foot, I were laden with stolen goods. With what impatience and fear I waited for the third bell!

But there it came at last, the saving third bell, the train set off; we passed the prison, the barracks, came out into open country, and my uneasiness, to my great surprise, still did not leave me, and I still felt like a thief, passionately longing to run. What strangeness was this? To distract and calm myself, I began looking out the window. The train was running along the shore. The sea was smooth, and the turquoise sky looked into it, cheerful and calm, nearly half tinged with the tender, golden-crimson color of sunset. Here and there on it darkened little fishing boats and rafts. The town, neat and pretty as a toy, stood on its high bank, already beginning to be wrapped in evening mist. The golden domes of its churches, its windows and greenery reflected the setting sun, burned and melted like liquid gold... The smell of the fields mingled with the tender dampness blowing off the sea.

The train flew on swiftly. The laughter of passengers and conductors could be heard. Everyone was gay and lighthearted, but my incomprehensible uneasiness only grew and grew... I looked at the light mist covering the town, and I pictured to myself how, in that mist, near the churches and the houses, a woman, with a senseless, dull face, was rushing about, searching for me, and, in the voice of a little girl, or in a sing-song like the Little Russian actress, moaning: ‘Ah, my God, my God!’ I recalled her serious face and her large, careworn eyes, when yesterday she had crossed me like her own child, and I mechanically kept glancing at my hand, which she had kissed the day before.

‘Am I in love, then?’ I asked myself, scratching my hand.

Only with the fall of night, when the passengers were asleep and I was left alone, face to face with my conscience, did I come to understand what I could not understand before. In the twilight of the carriage, Kisochka’s image stood before me, would not leave me, and I already understood clearly that I had done an evil equal to murder. My conscience tormented me. To smother that unbearable feeling, I told myself that it was all nonsense and vanity, that Kisochka and I would die and rot, that her grief was nothing beside death, and so on and so forth... That, in the end, there is no free will, and that I was, therefore, not to blame – but all these arguments only irritated me, and somehow faded away with a peculiar speed amid my other thoughts. In the hand that Kisochka had kissed there was a feeling of anguish... I lay down, then got up, drank vodka at the stations, forced myself to eat sandwiches, again set about persuading myself that life has no meaning, but nothing helped. In my head a strange, and, if you like, ridiculous labor was seething. The most varied thoughts piled up on one another in disorder, tangled, hindered each other, and I, the thinker, staring at the ground, understood nothing and could not orient myself at all in this heap of needed and needless thoughts. It turned out that I, the thinker, had not even mastered the technique of thinking, and that I no more knew how to manage my own head than how to mend a watch. For the first time in my life I was thinking hard and intently, and this seemed to me such a curiosity that I thought: ‘I’m losing my mind!’ Whoever’s brain works not always, but only in difficult moments, is prone to thoughts of madness.

I tormented myself in this way a night, a day, and then another night, and, having convinced myself of how little my thinking was helping me, I saw clearly at last and understood what sort of bird I was. I understood that my thoughts were not worth a copper coin, and that before my meeting with Kisochka I had not yet even begun to think, and had not the slightest idea what a serious thought even means; now, having suffered, I understood that I had had no convictions, no definite moral code, no heart, no reason; my entire intellectual and moral capital consisted of special knowledge, scraps, useless memories, other people’s thoughts – and nothing more, and my psychic movements were simple, uncomplicated, and elementary as a Yakut’s... If I did not like to tell lies, did not steal, did not kill, and, in general, did not commit obviously gross errors, it was not by virtue of any convictions – I had none – but simply because I was bound hand and foot by nursery-tale morality and copybook maxims, which had entered into my flesh and blood and which, imperceptibly to myself, guided me through life, though I considered them absurd...

I understood that I was not a thinker, not a philosopher, but simply a virtuoso. God gave me a healthy, strong Russian brain with the makings of talent. And now imagine that brain at twenty-six years of age, untrained, entirely free of billeting, unburdened by any freight, only slightly dusted with a bit of engineering knowledge; it is young and physiologically hungers for work, seeks it out, and suddenly, by a purely chance path, there falls into it, from without, a beautiful, luscious thought about aimless life and the darkness beyond the grave. It greedily draws that thought in, gives it the whole of its expanse to command, and begins playing with it every which way, like a cat with a mouse. The brain has neither erudition nor system, but that’s no trouble. On its own natural strength, self-taught fashion, it manages the broad thought, and before a month is out, the owner of that brain is already making a hundred tasty dishes out of a single potato, and fancies himself a thinker...

This virtuosity, this game at serious thought, our generation has carried into science, into literature, into politics, and everywhere it did not feel too lazy to go, and along with the virtuosity it carried its own coldness, its tedium, its one-sidedness, and, it seems to me, has already managed to raise up in the mass a new, hitherto unknown attitude toward serious thought.

My abnormality, and my thoroughgoing ignorance, I came to understand and appreciate thanks to that misfortune. My normal thinking, as it now seems to me, began only from the time when I set about the alphabet, that is, when my conscience drove me back to N., and I, without any cunning, confessed before Kisochka, begged her forgiveness like a boy, and wept together with her...”

Ananyev briefly described his last meeting with Kisochka and fell silent.

“Well, well...” the student said through his teeth, when the engineer had finished. “Such are the doings in this world!”

His face still expressed a laziness of the brain, and evidently Ananyev’s story had not moved him in the least. It was only when the engineer, after resting a moment, again set about developing his idea and repeating what he had already said at the start, that the student wrinkled up in irritation, rose from the table, and went off to his bed. He made his bed and began undressing.

“You look right now as though you’d actually convinced somebody of something!” he said irritably.

“I, convinced somebody?” the engineer asked. “My dear fellow, do I really lay claim to that? God forbid! There’s no convincing you! You can only arrive at conviction through personal experience and suffering!...”

“And besides, what remarkable logic!” the student grumbled, putting on his nightshirt. “Thoughts you dislike so much are ruinous for the young, but for old men, as you put it, they make up the norm. As if it were a matter of gray hair... Where does this privilege of old age come from? What’s it based on? If these thoughts are poison, then they’re poison for everyone alike.”

“Eh, no, my dear fellow, don’t say that!” said the engineer, and gave a sly wink. “Don’t say that! Old men, in the first place, aren’t virtuosos. Their pessimism doesn’t come to them from outside, by chance, but from the depths of their own brain, and only after they’ve worked their way through all sorts of Hegels and Kants, suffered, made a heap of mistakes, in a word, when they’ve gone up the whole ladder from bottom to top. Their pessimism has behind it both personal experience and a solid philosophical development. Secondly, in old thinkers pessimism isn’t idle chatter, the way it is with you and me, but a world-sorrow, a suffering; it has a Christian backing to it, because it flows from love of humankind and from thoughts about humankind, and is quite free of the egoism one notices in virtuosos. You despise life because its meaning and purpose are hidden precisely from you, and you’re afraid only of your own death, but a real thinker suffers that the truth is hidden from everyone, and fears for everyone. For instance, not far from here lives the government forester Ivan Alexandrych. A fine old fellow. At one time he was a teacher somewhere, scribbled a bit of something, the devil knows what he was, but he’s a remarkable clever fellow and has eaten his fill of philosophy. He reads a great deal, and still reads constantly. Well, sir, we happened to meet not long ago at the Gruzovsky section... And just at that time they were laying sleepers and rails there. Simple enough work, but to Ivan Alexandrych, being no specialist, it seemed like some sort of conjuring trick. To lay a sleeper and fix a rail to it, an experienced hand needs less than a minute. The workers were in good spirits and worked, indeed, deftly and fast; one rascal in particular hit the head of a spike wonderfully well and drove it in with a single swing, and the handle of the hammer must have been near a fathom long, and every spike a foot in length. Ivan Alexandrych watched the workers for a long while, was touched, and said to me with tears in his eyes: ‘What a pity that these remarkable people will die!’ That kind of pessimism I understand...”

“All that proves and explains nothing,” said the student, covering himself with the sheet, “it’s all just pounding water in a mortar! No one knows anything and nothing can be proved with words.”

He peeked out from under the sheet, raised his head, and, wrinkling up in irritation, said quickly:

“One has to be very naive to believe in human speech and logic and give them decisive weight. With words you can prove and disprove anything you like, and soon people will perfect the technique of language to such a degree that they’ll prove, with mathematical correctness, that twice two is seven. I like listening and reading, but believing, no, thank you very much, that I neither know how to do nor wish to. I’ll believe in God alone, and as for you, even if you talked to me till the Second Coming and seduced another five hundred Kisochkas besides, I’d believe you only when I go out of my mind... Good night!”

The student hid his head under the sheet and turned his face to the wall, wishing by this movement to make it understood that he no longer cared to listen or to talk. And with that the argument came to an end.

Before going to bed, the engineer and I went out of the barrack, and once more I saw the lights.

“We’ve worn you out with our chatter!” said Ananyev, yawning and looking at the sky. “Well, what can you do, my dear fellow! In this tedium the only pleasure is to drink a bit of wine and philosophize a bit... What an embankment, Lord!” he said, moved, as we came up to the embankment. “This isn’t an embankment, it’s Mount Ararat.”

He was silent a moment, and then said:

“To the Baron these lights recall the Amalekites, but to me it seems they’re like human thoughts... You know, the thoughts of every single person are scattered about in disorder in just this way, stretching somewhere toward a goal along a single line, through the darkness, and, without lighting or clearing up anything of the night, vanish somewhere far off – beyond old age... However, enough philosophizing! Time for bye-bye...”

When we returned to the barrack, the engineer began begging me to lie down without fail on his bed.

“Now, please!” he said imploringly, pressing both hands to his heart. “I beg you! And don’t worry about me. I can sleep anywhere, and besides, I won’t be lying down soon anyway... Do me that favor!”

I agreed, undressed, and lay down, while he sat down at the table and set about his drawings.

“No time for sleep for the likes of us, my dear fellow,” he was saying in a low voice, as I lay there with my eyes closed. “A man with a wife and a couple of children has no time for sleeping. Now one has to feed them and clothe them and put something by for the future. And I have two of them: a little son and a little daughter... The rascal of a boy has a fine little face... Not six years old yet, and his abilities, I tell you, are quite extraordinary... Now where did I put their photographs... Ah, my little ones, my little ones!”

He rummaged among his papers, found the photographs, and fell to looking at them. I fell asleep.

I was woken by Azorka’s barking and loud voices. Von Steinberg, in nothing but his underclothes, barefoot, his hair disheveled, was standing in the doorway, talking loudly with someone. Day was breaking... A gloomy, blue dawn looked in through the door, the windows, and the chinks of the barrack, and faintly lit my bed, the table with its papers, and Ananyev. Stretched out on the floor on a felt cloak, his fleshy, hairy chest bared, a leather cushion under his head, the engineer was asleep and snoring so loudly that I felt heartfelt pity for the student, who had to sleep beside him every night.

“And why on earth should we take delivery of them?” von Steinberg was shouting. “That’s got nothing to do with us! Go on to the engineer Chalisov! Whose boilers are these, anyway?”

“From Nikitin...” some bass voice answered sullenly.

“Well, then go to Chalisov... This isn’t our department. What the devil are you standing there for? Go on!”

“Your honor, we’ve already been to Mr. Chalisov’s!” said the bass voice, still more sullenly. “We’ve been looking for him along the line the whole of yesterday, and at their barrack they told us they’d gone off to the Dymkovsky section. Take them, do us that kindness! How much longer are we supposed to cart them around? We drive them and drive them along the line, and there’s no end in sight...”

“What is it?” Ananyev croaked, waking and quickly lifting his head.

“They’ve brought some boilers from Nikitin,” said the student, “and they’re asking us to take delivery of them. What business is it of ours to take delivery of them?”

“Chase them off!”

“Do us the kindness, your honor, get this sorted out! The horses haven’t eaten in two days, and the master, I daresay, is angry. Are we to cart them back, then? The railway ordered the boilers, so it’s the railway that ought to take delivery of them...”

“But do understand, you blockhead, this isn’t our affair! Go to Chalisov!”

“What’s that? Who’s there?” Ananyev croaked again. “Ah, the devil take them entirely,” he swore, getting up and going to the door. “What is it?”

I got dressed and, a couple of minutes later, went out of the barrack. Ananyev and the student, both in their underclothes and barefoot, were hotly and impatiently explaining something to a peasant who stood before them, hatless, a whip in his hand, and who, apparently, did not understand them. On both their faces was written the most everyday, workaday concern.

“What use are your boilers to me?” Ananyev was shouting. “Am I to wear them on my head, or what? If you didn’t find Chalisov, go look for his assistant, and leave us in peace!”

Catching sight of me, the student, apparently, remembered the conversation of the night before, and on his sleepy face the look of concern vanished and was replaced by an expression of that laziness of the brain. He waved the peasant off and, thinking about something, stepped aside.

The morning was overcast. Along the line, where the lights had shone in the night, the just-wakened workers were stirring. Voices could be heard, and the creaking of wheelbarrows. The working day was beginning. A little horse in a rope harness was already trudging up onto the embankment, straining its neck with all its might, dragging behind it a cart of sand...

I began saying my goodbyes... Much had been said in the night, but I was not carrying away with me a single settled question, and of the whole conversation, now, in the morning, there remained in my memory, as though filtered, only the lights and the image of Kisochka. Mounting my horse, I looked once more at the student and Ananyev, at the hysterical dog with its dull, as though drunken eyes, at the workers flickering in the morning mist, at the embankment, at the little horse straining its neck, and thought:

“There’s no making anything out in this world!”

And when I struck my horse and galloped off along the line, and when, a little later, I saw before me only the endless, sullen plain and the overcast, cold sky, the questions that had been argued over that night came back to me. I thought, and the sun-scorched plain, the enormous sky, the darkening oak wood far off, and the misty distance seemed to be saying to me: “Yes, there’s no understanding anything in this world!”

The sun began to rise...