Nadya went upstairs and saw the familiar bed, the familiar windows and simple white curtains, and from the windows there could be seen the familiar view of the garden, brilliant with sunshine, gay and clamorous with birdsong. She ran her fingers over the table, sat down, and fell to thinking. She had enjoyed a good dinner, and the tea was served with delicious thick cream, but something was missing. She was aware of the emptiness of the room, and the ceilings were very low. In the evening when she went to bed, covering herself with the bedclothes, it somehow seemed absurd to be lying in that warm, very soft bed.
Nina Ivanovna came in for a moment and sat down, as people do when they feel guilty. She was timid and kept glancing round her.
“Tell me, Nadya, how is everything?” she asked after a moment’s silence. “Are you contented? Quite contented?”
“Yes, Mama.”
Nina Ivanovna rose and made the sign of the cross over Nadya and over the window.
“As you see, I have grown deeply religious,” she said. “You know, I am studying philosophy now, and I am always thinking, thinking.… And many things are clear as daylight now. It seems to me now that what is necessary above all is that life should pass as it were through a prism.”
“Mama, tell me, how is Grandmother?”
“Oh, she’s all right. When you went away with Sasha, and then when your telegram came, your grandmother read it and fell to the ground, and for three days she lay in bed without moving. After that she was always praying and weeping. But now it’s over.”
She got up and walked around the room.
“Tick-tock …” came the tapping of the night watchman. “Tick-tock, tick-tock …”
“What is necessary above all is that life should as it were pass through a prism,” she said. “In other words, what is necessary is that our life in consciousness should be analyzed into its simplest elements, as though into the seven primary colors, and each element must be studied separately.”
What else Nina Ivanovna said, and when she went away, Nadya did not know, for she soon fell asleep.
May passed, and June came. Nadya had grown accustomed to being at home. Grandmother fussed over the samovar, and gave deep sighs, while Nina Ivanovna spent her evenings talking about philosophy; she still lived in the house like a poor cousin, and she had to ask Grandmother for every twenty-kopeck piece. There were heaps of flies in the house, and the ceilings seemed to be falling lower and lower. For fear of meeting Father Andrey and Andrey Andreyich, Granny and Nina Ivanovna never went out into the streets. Nadya wandered through the garden and strolled down the streets, gazing at the houses and the gray fences, and it seemed to her that everything in the town had been growing old for a long time, and the town itself had outlived its day and was now waiting either for the end or for the beginning of something fresh and young. Oh, if only this new pure life would come more quickly, a life where one could look one’s fate in the eyes boldly and straightforwardly, sure of being right, joyful and free! Sooner or later this life would come! The time would come when there would be nothing left of her grandmother’s house, that house where everything was so arranged that the four servants could only live in the basement in a single filthy room—the time would come when no trace of the house would remain, when it would be forgotten and no one would remember it. Nadya’s only distraction came from the little boys next door: when she wandered in the garden, they banged on the fence and shouted with glee: “The bride! The bride!”
A letter from Sasha arrived from Saratov. In his happy, dancing handwriting he wrote that the journey down the Volga was a complete success, but he had fallen rather ill in Saratov, and had lost his voice and was spending these last two weeks in the hospital. She knew what this meant, and she was overwhelmed with a foreboding which amounted to a complete certainty. It hurt her that her foreboding and her thoughts about Sasha did not distress her, as once they would have done. She passionately wanted to live and she longed to be in St. Petersburg, and her friendship with Sasha, although still sweet, seemed to belong to a far-distant past. She could not sleep all night, and in the morning she sat by the window, listening. And she did hear voices coming from downstairs: her grandmother was asking questions in rapid, querulous tones, and someone was weeping.… When Nadya went down, her grandmother was standing in a corner of the room praying, and her face was wet with tears. On the table lay a telegram.
For a long while Nadya paced up and down the room, listening to her grandmother’s sobs; then she picked up the telegram and read it. The telegram said that on the previous morning, in Saratov, Alexander Timofeyich, Sasha for short, had died of consumption.
Grandmother and Nina Ivanovna went to the church to order a service for the dead, while Nadya remained in her room, deep in thought. She realized clearly that her life had been revolutionized, as Sasha had wished, and she was a stranger here, lonely and unwanted, and there was nothing she wanted here. She realized, too, that the past had been ripped away from her and had now vanished altogether, as though it had been burned and the ashes had been scattered in the winds. She went into Sasha’s room and stood there.
“Good-by, dear Sasha,” she murmured.
In her imagination life stretched before her, a new, vast, infinitely spacious life, and this life, though still obscure and full of mysteries, lured and attracted her.
She went upstairs to her own room to pack, and the next morning said good-by to her family, and left the town. She was full of life and high spirits, and she expected never to return.
1903
About the Author
ANTON CHEKHOV was born on January 17, 1860, in the small seaport town of Taganrog in the south of Russia, the grandson of a serf. In debt, his family fled Taganrog, leaving behind the sixteen-year-old Chekhov, who was forced to serve as a tutor to their creditor’s son. By the time he was nineteen, Chekhov had entered medical school and had begun writing stories for magazines. In spite of a lifelong battle with tuberculosis, Chekhov assumed complete responsibility for his parents and siblings, and was consequently always in financial straits, pooling his resources as a doctor and writer to support them. An inveterate nomad, he traveled throughout Russia, Germany, Italy, France, and parts of the Far East, seeking relief for his poor health and inspiration for his work. Acknowledged as possibly the greatest Russian playwright, his stories are also those of a master. As Sir V. S. Pritchett remarked, “[Chekhov’s] genius, in my opinion, lies above all in his creative gifts as a writer of short stories.” He died on July 2, 1904, in Germany.
Anton Chekhov, Forty Stories
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