“LET ME! I WANT TO DRIVE MYSELF! I’ll sit beside the coachman!” Sofya Lvovna said loudly. “Coachman, wait, I’ll sit on the box with you.”
She was standing up in the sledge, and her husband Vladimir Nikitych and her childhood friend Vladimir Mikhailych were holding her by the arms to keep her from falling. The troika raced along quickly.
“I said not to give her cognac,” Vladimir Nikitych whispered vexedly to his companion. “What a one, really!”
The colonel knew from experience that in such women as his wife Sofya Lvovna violent, slightly drunken gaiety is usually followed by hysterical laughter and then tears. He was afraid that now, when they came home, instead of sleeping, he would have to fuss with compresses and drops.
“Whoa!” cried Sofya Lvovna. “I want to drive!”
She was genuinely happy and triumphant. Over the past two months, ever since her wedding day, she had been beset by the thought that her marriage to Colonel Yagich was of convenience and, as they say, par dépit.1 Tonight, in a suburban restaurant, she had finally become convinced that she loved him passionately. In spite of his fifty-four years, he was so trim, adroit, supple, he quipped and sang along with the Gypsies so nicely. Really, nowadays older people are a thousand times more interesting than the young, and it looks as if old age and youth have exchanged roles. The colonel was two years older than her father, but could this circumstance have any meaning, if, in all conscience, there was immeasurably more of life’s force, vigor, and freshness in him than in her, though she was only twenty-three?
“Oh, my dearest!” she thought. “My wonderful one!”
In the restaurant she had also become convinced that there was not even a spark of the former feeling left in her heart. To her childhood friend Vladimir Mikhailych, or simply Volodya, whom still yesterday she had loved to the point of madness, of despair, she now felt herself totally indifferent. All that evening he had seemed listless to her, sleepy, uninteresting, insignificant, and this time the coolness with which he usually avoided paying the check in restaurants had outraged her, and she had barely kept herself from saying to him: “If you’re poor, stay home.” The colonel alone had paid.
Maybe because trees, telegraph poles, and snowdrifts kept flashing by her eyes, the most varied thoughts came into her head. She thought: a hundred and twenty to pay the check in the restaurant, and a hundred for the Gypsies, and tomorrow, if she likes, she can throw even a thousand roubles to the wind, yet two months ago, before the wedding, she didn’t have even three roubles to her name, and had to turn to her father for every trifle. What a change in life!
Her thoughts were confused, and she recalled how, when she was around ten years old, Colonel Yagich, now her husband, had paid court to her aunt, and everyone in the house said he ruined her, and in fact the aunt often came to dinner with tearful eyes and kept driving somewhere, and people said that the poor thing didn’t know what to do with herself. He was very handsome then and had extraordinary success with women, so that the whole town knew him, and the story went that he visited his lady admirers every day, the way a doctor visits his patients. And even now, despite the gray hair, the wrinkles, and the spectacles, his lean face sometimes looked very handsome, especially in profile.
Sofya Lvovna’s father was an army doctor and had once served in the same regiment with Yagich. Volodya’s father was also an army doctor and had also served in the same regiment with her father and Yagich. In spite of love adventures, often very complex and troublesome, Volodya was an excellent student; he finished his studies at the university with great success, chose foreign literature as his specialization, and is now said to be writing his dissertation. He lives in the barracks with his father, the army doctor, and has no money of his own, though he is already thirty. In childhood he and Sofya Lvovna lived in different apartments, but under the same roof, and he often came to play with her, and they took dancing and French lessons together. But when he grew up and became a slim, very handsome young man, she began to feel bashful with him, then fell madly in love with him, and loved him until quite recently, when she married Yagich. He, too, had extraordinary success with women, almost since the age of fourteen, and the ladies who were unfaithful to their husbands with him excused themselves by saying that Volodya was little. Not long ago someone told of him that, supposedly, when he was a student, he lived in furnished rooms close to the university, and each time someone knocked on his door, his footsteps would be heard and then a low-voiced apology: “Pardon, je ne suis pas seul.”2 Yagich went into raptures over him, gave him his blessing for the future, as Derzhavin had Pushkin,3 and apparently loved him. For hours at a time they silently played billiards or blackjack together, and if Yagich went somewhere in a troika, he took Volodya with him, and Volodya initiated Yagich alone into the mysteries of his dissertation. Earlier, when the colonel was younger, they often wound up in the position of rivals, but they were never jealous of each other. In society, where they appeared together, Yagich was called big Volodya and his friend little Volodya.
Besides big Volodya, little Volodya, and Sofya Lvovna, there was one more person in the sledge—Margarita Alexandrovna, or, as everyone called her, Rita, Madame Yagich’s cousin, a girl already over thirty, very pale, with black eyebrows, in a pince-nez, who chain-smoked cigarettes, even outside in freezing weather. Her breast and knees were always covered with ashes. She spoke nasally, drawing out each word, was cold-tempered, could drink any quantity of liqueurs and cognac without getting drunk, told off-color jokes flatly, insipidly. At home she read intellectual journals from morning till night, sprinkling them with ashes, or else ate frozen apples.
“Sonya, stop acting up,” she said in a singsong voice. “It’s really stupid.”
In sight of the city gates, the troika slowed its pace, houses and people flashed by, and Sofya Lvovna quieted down, pressed herself to her husband, and gave herself up to her thoughts. Little Volodya sat facing her. Now her happy, bright thoughts already began to mingle with gloomy ones. She thought: This man who sits facing her was aware that she had loved him, and of course he believed the gossip that she had married the colonel par dépit. She had never once confessed her love to him, and did not want him to know, and she hid her feeling, but by his face it could be seen that he understood her perfectly—and her vanity suffered. The most humiliating thing about her position was that after the wedding this little Volodya suddenly started paying attention to her, which had never happened before. He would sit with her for long hours silently, or chatting about trifles, and now, in the sledge, he did not talk to her, but only stepped lightly on her foot, or pressed her hand. Obviously, all he had needed was that she get married; and it was obvious that he despised her, and that she aroused in him only an interest of a certain kind, as a bad and dishonorable woman. And when triumph and love for her husband mingled in her soul with a feeling of humiliation and offended pride, she became defiant and wanted to sit on the box and shout, whistle…
Just as they were driving past a convent, they heard the stroke of the big twenty-ton bell. Rita crossed herself.
“Our Olya is in this convent,” Sofya Lvovna said, also crossing herself and shuddering.
“Why did she go to the convent?” asked the colonel.
“Par dépit,” Rita replied angrily, obviously alluding to the marriage of Sofya Lvovna and Yagich. “This par dépit is fashionable nowadays. A challenge to the whole world. She loved to laugh, was a desperate flirt, only liked balls and her cavaliers, and suddenly—there, take that! Surprise!”
“That’s not true,” said little Volodya, turning down the collar of his fur coat and showing his handsome face. “There’s no par dépit in it, but sheer horror, if you wish. Her brother Dmitri was sent to hard labor and now nobody knows where he is. And her mother died of grief.”
He turned up his collar again.
“And Olya did well,” he added hollowly. “To live in the position of a ward, and with such a treasure as Sofya Lvovna—give that some thought!”
Sofya Lvovna heard the contemptuous tone of his voice and wanted to say something insolent to him, but she kept silent. She again became defiant; she got to her feet and shouted in a tearful voice:
“I want to go to matins! Coachman, turn back! I want to see Olya!”
They turned back. The ringing of the convent bell was deep, and, as it seemed to Sofya Lvovna, there was something in it reminiscent of Olya and her life. Bells were ringing in the other churches as well. When the coachman reined in the troika, Sofya Lvovna jumped out of the sledge and alone, without escort, quickly walked to the gateway.
“Hurry up, please!” called her husband. “It’s already late.”
She walked through the dark gateway, then down the avenue that led from the gates to the main church, and the snow crunched under her feet, and the ringing now came from right over her head and seemed to penetrate her whole being. Here was the church door, three steps down, then the vestibule with icons of saints on both sides, a smell of juniper and incense, another door, and a dark little figure opened it and bowed low, very low…Inside the church, the service had not begun yet. One nun was walking around the iconostasis lighting candles on the stands, another was lighting the big chandelier. Here and there, close to the columns and to the side chapels, dark figures stood motionless. “The way they’re standing now, it means they won’t budge till morning,” Sofya Lvovna thought, and to her the place seemed dark, cold, boring—more boring than at the cemetery. With a feeling of boredom she looked at the motionless, frozen figures, and suddenly her heart was wrung. Somehow in one of the nuns, small, with narrow shoulders and a black headcloth, she recognized Olya, though Olya, when she left for the convent, had been plump and had seemed taller. Hesitantly, extremely agitated for some reason, Sofya Lvovna went up to the novice, looked over her shoulder, and saw it was Olya.
“Olya!” she said and clasped her hands, and could no longer speak from agitation. “Olya!”
The nun recognized her at once, raised her eyebrows in surprise, and her pale, recently washed, clean face, and even, as it seemed, her white coif, which could be seen under the headcloth, brightened with joy.
“This is a God-sent miracle,” she said, and also clasped her thin, pale hands.
Sofya Lvovna embraced her tightly and kissed her, fearing as she did so that she smelled of drink.
“We were just driving by and remembered about you,” she said, breathless as if from walking quickly. “Lord, you’re so pale! I…I’m very glad to see you. Well, so? How is it? Do you miss us?”
Sofya Lvovna glanced at the other nuns and went on in a low voice:
“We’ve had so many changes…You know, I married Yagich, Vladimir Nikitych. You surely remember him…I’m very happy with him.”
“Well, thank God. And your papa is in good health?”
“Yes. He often speaks of you. Come to see us during the holidays, Olya. You hear?”
“I will,” Olya said and smiled. “I’ll come on the second day.”
Sofya Lvovna began to cry, not knowing why herself, and for a minute she cried silently, then wiped her eyes and said:
“Rita will be very sorry not to have seen you. She’s also with us. And Volodya’s here. They’re by the gate. They’d be so glad to see you! Let’s go to them, the service hasn’t started yet.”
“Let’s go,” Olya agreed.
She crossed herself three times and walked to the door together with Sofya Lvovna.
“So you say you’re happy, Sonechka?” she asked when they were outside the gate.
“Very.”
“Well, thank God.”
Big Volodya and little Volodya, seeing the nun, got out of the sledge and greeted her respectfully. They were both visibly moved by her pale face and black monastic habit, and they were both pleased that she remembered them and came to greet them. To keep her warm, Sofya Lvovna wrapped her in a plaid and put the skirt of her fur coat around her. Her recent tears had eased and brightened her heart, and she was glad that this noisy, restless, and essentially impure night had unexpectedly ended so purely and meekly. In order to keep Olya beside her for longer, she suggested:
“Let’s take her for a ride! Get in, Olya, just for a little.”
The men expected that she would refuse—nuns don’t ride in troikas—but to their surprise she accepted and got into the sledge. And as the troika raced to the gate, they were all silent and only tried to make sure she was comfortable and warm, and each of them thought of how she had been before and how she was now. Her face now was impassive, expressionless, cold and pale, transparent, as if water flowed in her veins instead of blood. Yet two or three years ago she had been plump, red-cheeked, talked about suitors, laughed at the merest trifle…
By the gate the troika turned back; ten minutes later, when it stopped at the convent, Olya got out of the sledge. The bells were already chiming.
“God save you,” said Olya, and she bowed low, in monastic fashion.
“So come to see us, Olya.”
“I will, I will.”
She quickly walked away and soon disappeared through the dark gateway. And after that, for some reason, when the troika drove on, everything became very sad. They were all silent. Sofya Lvovna felt weak all over and lost heart; that she had made the nun get into the sledge and go for a ride, in tipsy company, now seemed stupid to her, tactless, and all but blasphemous; along with intoxication, the wish to deceive herself also went away, and it was clear to her that she did not and could not love her husband, that it was all nonsense and stupidity. She had married out of convenience, because he, as her boarding-school friends put it, was insanely rich, and because she was afraid to be left an old maid, like Rita, and because she was sick of her doctor father and wanted to annoy little Volodya. If she could have foreseen, when she married, that it would be so oppressive, scary, and ugly, she would not have agreed to the marriage for anything in the world. But now the harm could not be set right. She had to reconcile to it.
They came home. Getting into her warm, soft bed and covering herself with a blanket, Sofya Lvovna remembered the dark side chapel, the smell of incense, and the figures by the columns, and it was scary for her to think that those figures would stand motionless all the while she slept. There would be the long, long matins, then the hours, then the liturgy, the prayer service…
“But there is God, surely there is, and I will certainly die, which means that sooner or later I must think about my soul, about eternal life, like Olya. Olya is saved now, she has resolved all the questions for herself…But what if there is no God? Then her life is lost. But how is it lost? Why lost?”
After a moment a thought again came to her head:
“There is God, death will certainly come, one must think of one’s soul. If Olya sees her death now, she won’t be frightened. She’s ready. And above all, she has already resolved the question of life for herself. There is God…yes…But can it be that there’s no other solution than going into a convent? Going into a convent means renouncing life, ruining it…”
Sofya Lvovna felt a little frightened; she hid her head under the pillow.
“I mustn’t think about it,” she whispered. “I mustn’t…”
Yagich was walking on the carpet in the next room, softly jingling his spurs, and thinking about something. It occurred to Sofya Lvovna that this man was near and dear to her only for one thing: he was also named Vladimir. She sat up in bed and called out tenderly:
“Volodya!”
“What is it?” her husband replied.
“Nothing.”
She lay down again. She heard ringing, maybe from the same convent, she again recalled the side chapel and the dark figures, in her head wandered thoughts about God and inevitable death, and she covered her head with the blanket so as not to hear the bells. She reflected that, before the arrival of old age and death, there would drag out a long, long life, and day after day she would have to reckon with the intimacy of an unloved man, who had already come into the bedroom and was getting into bed, and to stifle in herself a hopeless love for another—young, charming, and, as it seemed to her, extraordinary. She glanced at her husband and was about to wish him good night, but instead she suddenly began to cry. She was vexed with herself.
“Well, here comes the music!” said Yagich, stressing the mu.
She calmed down, but late, only by ten o’clock in the morning; she stopped crying and trembling all over, but instead she was beginning to have a bad headache. Yagich was hurrying to the late liturgy and grumbled at his orderly, who was helping him to dress in the next room. He came into the bedroom once, softly jingling his spurs, and took something, then once more, already in his epaulettes and medals, limping slightly from rheumatism, and for some reason it seemed to Sofya Ivanovna that he walked and looked like a predator.
She heard Yagich make a telephone call.
“Please connect me with the Vassilyevsky Barracks!” he said, and a minute later: “Vassilyevsky Barracks? Please call Doctor Salimovich to the phone…” And after another minute: “Who is that on the phone? You, Volodya? Very glad. My dear boy, ask your father to come to the phone now. My spouse has gone quite to pieces after last evening. Not home, you say? Hm…Thank you. Excellent…much obliged…Merci.”
Yagich came into the bedroom for a third time, bent down to his wife, made a cross over her, let her kiss his hand (women who loved him kissed his hand, and he was used to it), and said he would be back for dinner. And he left.
Sometime after eleven o’clock the maid announced that Vladimir Mikhailych had come. Sofya Lvovna, reeling from fatigue and the headache, quickly put on her astonishing new mauve housecoat trimmed with fur and hurriedly did up her hair somehow. She felt an inexpressible tenderness in her soul, and trembled from joy and the fear that he might leave. She wanted at least to have a look at him.
Little Volodya had come to visit, properly dressed in a tailcoat and white tie. When Sofya Lvovna came in, he kissed her hand and said he sincerely regretted that she was not well. Then, when they sat down, he praised her housecoat.
“Yesterday’s meeting with Olya upset me,” she said. “At first I was terrified, but now I envy her. She’s an indestructible rock, she can’t be moved from her place; but can it be, Volodya, that she had no other way out? Can it be that to bury yourself alive is to resolve the question of life? It’s death, not life.”
At the mention of Olya, tenderness appeared on little Volodya’s face.
“Look, Volodya, you’re an intelligent person,” said Sofya Lvovna. “Teach me to act just as she has. Of course, I’m an unbeliever, and I wouldn’t go into a convent, but I could do something tantamount. My life isn’t easy,” she went on after a brief pause. “Do teach me…Say something persuasive to me. Say at least one word.”
“One word? All right: tararaboomdeay.”
“Why do you despise me, Volodya?” she asked quickly. “You speak to me in some sort of peculiar—forgive me—foppish language, such as one doesn’t use with friends and respectable women. You’re a success as a scholar, you’re fond of learning, why don’t you ever talk to me about your learning? Why? Am I not worthy?”
Little Volodya winced peevishly and said:
“Why do you suddenly want learning? Maybe you want a constitution? Or maybe sturgeon with horseradish?”
“Well, all right, I’m worthless, trashy, without principles, and none too bright. I’ve made no end of mistakes, I’m a psychopath, I’m spoiled, and I ought to be despised for it. But you’re ten years older than me, Volodya, and my husband is thirty years older. I grew up in your presence, and if you wanted, you could have made whatever you like out of me, even an angel. But you…” (her voice quavered) “behave terribly with me. Yagich married me when he was already old, but you…”
“Well, enough, enough,” said Volodya, sitting close to her and kissing both of her hands. “Let the Schopenhauers philosophize and prove whatever they like, but we will kiss these little hands.”
“You despise me, and if you only knew how I suffer from it!” she said hesitantly, knowing beforehand that he would not believe her. “And if you only knew how I want to change, to start a new life! I think of it with rapture,” she said, and she actually shed a few tears of rapture. “To be a good, honest, pure human being, not to lie, to have a goal in life.”
“Now, now, now, please don’t pretend! I don’t like it!” said Volodya, and his face acquired an annoyed expression. “By God, just as if you’re onstage! Let’s behave like human beings.”
So that he would not get angry and leave, she began to apologize and, to please him, even forced herself to smile, and again talked about Olya and about her own wish to resolve the question of her life, to become a human being.
“Tara…ra…boomdeay…,” he sang in a low voice. “Tara…ra…boomdeay!”
And suddenly he took her by the waist. And she, not knowing herself what she was doing, put her hands on his shoulders and for a moment, as if in a daze, stared with admiration at his intelligent, mocking face, his brow, his eyes, his handsome beard…
“You’ve known for a long time that I love you,” she confessed and blushed painfully, feeling that her lips had even twisted convulsively from shame. “I love you. Why do you torment me?”
She shut her eyes and kissed him firmly on the lips; and for a long time, perhaps a full minute, she could not end the kiss, though she knew it was improper, that he himself might disapprove of her, or a servant might come in…
“Oh, how you torment me!” she repeated.
When, half an hour later, having obtained what he wanted, he was sitting in the dining room and eating, she knelt before him and greedily looked into his face, and he told her she looked like a little dog waiting to be thrown a piece of ham. Then he sat her on his knee and, rocking her like a child, sang:
“Tara…raboomdeay…Tara…raboomdeay!”
When he was preparing to leave, she asked him in a passionate voice:
“When? Today? Where?”
And she reached both hands out to his mouth, as if wishing to seize the answer even with her hands.
“Today is hardly convenient,” he said on reflection. “Maybe tomorrow.”
And they parted. Before dinner Sofya Lvovna went to the convent to see Olya, but they told her Olya was somewhere reading the psalter over a dead person. From the convent she went to her father and also did not find him at home. Then she changed cabs and started going aimlessly around the streets and lanes, and went on driving like that until evening. And for some reason she kept remembering that same aunt with the tearful eyes, who didn’t know what to do with herself.
At night they again drove off in the troika and listened to the Gypsies in the suburban restaurant. And when they went past the convent again, Sofya Lvovna remembered about Olya, and she felt eerie at the thought that for the girls and women of her circle there was no solution except to keep driving around in troikas and lying, or to go into a convent to mortify the flesh…The next day there was a rendezvous, and again Sofya Lvovna rode around town alone in a cab and remembered her aunt.
A week later little Volodya abandoned her. And after that, life went on as before, just as uninteresting, dreary, and sometimes even tormenting. The colonel and little Volodya played long rounds of billiards and piquet, Rita told jokes insipidly and flatly, Sofya Lvovna kept riding around in a cab and asked her husband to give her a ride in the troika.
She stopped by the convent almost every day, bothered Olya, complaining about her unbearable sufferings, wept, and felt all the while that something impure, pathetic, and shabby had entered the cell with her, while Olya kept telling her, mechanically, in the tone of a lesson learned by rote, that it was all nothing, it would all pass, and God would forgive.
1893