It’s strange that the Caucasus don’t appeal to Laevsky, he thought, very strange. He encountered five armed soldiers who saluted him. A civil servant’s wife and her school-aged son passed along the sidewalk on the right side of the boulevard.

“Maria Konstantinovna, good morning!” Samoylenko called out to her, smiling pleasantly. “Have you been for a swim? Ha-ha-ha … My regards to Nikodim Aleksandrich!”

And he went on, continuing to smile pleasantly, until, seeing that he was about to encounter an approaching military medical assistant, suddenly scowled, stopped him and inquired:

“Is there anyone at the infirmary?”

“No one, Your Excellency.”

“What’s that?”

“No one, Your Excellency.”

“Very good, carry on …”

Majestically swaggering, he turned in the direction of a lemonade stand, where an old, buxom Jewess passing herself off as a Georgian sat behind the counter and said to her loudly, as though commanding a regiment:

“Please be a dear, give me a soda water!”

* “Nadezhda” is Russian for “hope.”

II

Laevsky’s lack of love for Nadezhda Fyodorovna manifested itself mainly in that everything she said and did seemed a lie to him, or something resembling a lie, and everything that he read disparaging of women and love seemed as though it couldn’t apply better to himself, to Nadezhda Fyodorovna and to her husband. When he returned home she was sitting at the window, already dressed and coiffed, drinking coffee with an anxious expression on her face and flipping through the pages of a fat journal, and he thought to himself that the act of drinking coffee is not such a stupendous event that it should merit an anxious expression, and that she had wasted time in vain on a fashionable hairstyle, as no one here appreciated it and it was all for nothing. And in the pages of the journal he saw a lie. He thought that just as she dressed and coiffed so that she would appear pretty, she read so that she would appear smart.

“Would it be all right if I went swimming today?” she asked.

“What? You’ll go or you won’t go, it’s not an earth-shattering event either way, I suppose …”

“No, that’s why I’m asking, I wouldn’t want the doctor to be upset with me.”

“Well, go ask the doctor, then. I’m not a doctor.”

This time what Laevsky disliked most of all about Nadezhda Fyodorovna was her white, exposed neck and the curls of hair on the nape of her neck, and he remembered that when Anna Karenina had fallen out of love with her husband, she began to dislike his ears above all else, and he thought to himself: How true it is! How true! Feeling weak and empty headed, he went into his study, lay down on the divan and covered his face with a handkerchief, so that the flies would not irritate him. Languid, torpid thoughts all about one and the same thing stretched out through his brain like a long wagon train in foul autumnal weather and he fell into a drowsy, dejected state. It seemed to him that he was culpable before Nadezhda Fyodorovna and before her husband, and that her husband’s death had been all his fault. It seemed to him that he was culpable before his life, which he’d ruined, before the world of grand ideas, knowledge and labor, and he imagined that wonder-filled world to be possible and to exist not here on this shore, where hungry Turks and lazy Abkhazians wandered about, but there to the north, where there is opera, theater, newspapers and all sorts of cerebral labor. To be honest, smart, outspoken and pure was only possible there, not here. He blamed himself for not having ideals or a master plan in life, as he dimly realized now what this meant. Two years earlier, when he had fallen in love with Nadezhda Fyodorovna, he had been convinced that all he had to do was run off with Nadezhda Fyodorovna and to set off with her for the Caucasus, thus he would be spared the banality and emptiness of life; he was now equally convinced that all he had to do was cast off Nadezhda Fyodorovna and set off for Petersburg, thereby attaining all that he required.

“Run!” he muttered to himself, sitting and gnawing his nails. “Run!”

His imagination unfurled: there he is boarding a steamship and then sitting down to breakfast, drinking cold beer, chatting with the ladies on deck, then in Sevastopol boarding a train and traveling. Hello, freedom! The stations flicker past one after the other, the air becomes ever colder and harsher, now birch and spruce trees, now Kursk, Moscow … Shchi in the buffets, lamb with kasha, sturgeon, beer—in a word, not the Asiatic, but Russia, the real Russia. The passengers on the train speak of trade, the latest singers, of Franco-Russian affinity; everywhere the feeling of animated, cultured, intelligent, exhilarating life … Faster, faster! Here, at last, is Nevsky, Bolshaya Morskaya, and there’s Kovensky Lane, where he had once lived among students, there’s the dear, gray sky, misty rain, wet coach-drivers …

“Ivan Andreich!” someone called out from the neighboring room. “Are you home?”

“I’m here!” Laevsky answered. “What do you need?”

“Papers.”

Laevsky rose lazily, with a feeling of dizziness and, yawning, his shoes smacking the floor, went to the neighboring room. There in the street, in front of the open window, stood one of his young colleagues, who laid official papers out on the windowsill.

“Just a minute, my good man,” Laevsky said softly, and went to find pen and ink. Returning to the window, he signed the papers without reading them and said: “It’s hot!”

“Yes sir. Are you coming in today?”

“Unlikely … I think I’m coming down with something … My good man, tell Sheshkovsky that I’ll come see him after dinner.”

The clerk left. Laevsky lay down on the divan in his room again and began to think:

Now then, it’s necessary to weigh all the factors and to figure this out. Before leaving this place, I must pay my debts. I owe nearly two thousand rubles. I have no money … This, of course, isn’t important. I’ll pay half now somehow, and the other half I’ll send from Petersburg. Most important is Nadezhda Fyodorovna … First and foremost, we must determine what our relationship is … Yes.

A little later on, he thought: Wouldn’t it be better to go to Samoylenko for advice?

It’s easy enough to go, he thought, but what’s the use of it? I’d just start telling him malapropos about the boudoir, about women, about what is or isn’t fair. Damn it, how can there be any question of what is or isn’t fair, when my life requires saving, and fast, when I’m suffocating in this damned captivity and killing myself? … It must, finally, be understood, that to continue a life like mine is underhanded and unrelenting, in the face of which all else is petty and insignificant. Run! he muttered, sitting down.