Run!

The emptiness of the seashore, the insatiable swelter and the monotony of the dusky, lilac mountains, eternally the same and silent, eternally lonely, bore on his melancholy and, seemingly, sedated and looted him. It may well have been that he was a very smart, talented, remarkable straight-shooter; it may well have been that were he not surrounded by sea and mountains on all sides, a first-class regional director, a government man, an orator, a public figure, an ascetic would have emerged from within him. Who knows! What if a gifted and industrious man—a musician or an artist, for instance—were to escape captivity by tearing down a wall and tricking his jailers, isn’t it foolish to then expound on what’s fair and what’s not? In such a situation, everything that man does is fair.

At two o’clock Laevsky and Nadezhda Fyodorovna sat down to dinner. When the scullery maid had served them rice soup with tomatoes, Laevsky said:

“It’s the same thing every day. Is there any reason why we can’t have shchi?”

“There’s no cabbage.”

“Strange. If they cook shchi with cabbage at Samoylenko’s, and there’s shchi at Maria Konstantinovna’s, it must just be me that’s supposed to eat this sweetish slop for some reason. This isn’t right, my dove.”

As is the case among the vast majority of married couples, before neither Laevsky nor Nadezhda Fyodorovna could get through a dinner without caprices and a scene, but since Laevsky decided that he no longer loved her, he tried to yield to Nadezhda Fyodorovna in all matters, speaking to her gently and politely, smiling at her, and calling her a dove.

“The taste of this soup reminds me of licorice,” he said, smiling; he was straining himself so as to appear amicable, but couldn’t hold back and said: “No one is taking care of this household … If you’re too sick or too busy with your reading, then allow me, I’ll attend to our kitchen.”

Earlier, she would have answered with So attend to it or I see you want to make a scullery maid out of me, but now she merely glanced at him sheepishly and turned red.

“Well, how do you feel today?” he asked tenderly.

“Today is not so bad. There is only a touch of weakness.”

“You need to take care of yourself, my dove. I’m terribly worried about you.”

Something ailed Nadezhda Fyodorovna. Samoylenko said that she had remittent fever and fed her quinine. Another doctor, Ustimovich, a tall, spindly, misanthropic man, who sat at home by day and strolled quietly along the embankment coughing with his hands folded behind him and his cane stretched lengthwise down his back by night, found that she had a female ailment, and prescribed warm compresses. Before, when Laevsky still loved her, Nadezhda Fyodorovna’s illness would arouse feelings of sympathy and fear in him, but now he considered even her illness to be a lie. The jaundiced, sleepy face, the faded expression and the yawning that would occasionally seize Nadezhda Fyodorovna after an onset of fever, and that she, while in the midst of the onset, would lie beneath a plaid blanket and resembled a boy, more than a woman, and that her room was stuffy and smelled bad—all this, in his opinion, destroyed any illusion and was a protest against love and marriage.

For the second course he was served spinach with hard-boiled eggs, but Nadezhda Fyodorovna was served kissel and milk, like an invalid. When she, with an anxious expression, first touched her spoon to the kissel and then began to lazily eat it, washing it down with milk, and he heard her swallows, he was overcome by such an intense feeling of hatred that his head began to itch. He was aware that such a feeling would have been insulting even in the society of dogs, although he was not aggravated with himself but with Nadezhda Fyodorovna for having aroused such a feeling in him, and he understood why lovers sometimes kill their beloved. He couldn’t kill her himself, of course, but if he ever found himself serving on a jury, he would exonerate the murderer.

“Merci, my dove,” he said after dinner, and kissed Nadezhda Fyodorovna on the forehead.

Retiring to his study, he spent about five minutes pacing the room from corner to corner, cast a sidelong glance at his boots, then sat down on the divan and began to mutter:

“Run! Run! I must determine what our relationship is and run!”

He lay down on the divan and again remembered that the death of Nadezhda Fyodorovna’s husband could have been his fault.

It’s foolish to accuse a man of falling in or out of love, he convinced himself, leaning back and lifting his legs to put on his boots. It’s not in our power to control love and hate. As for the husband, it’s possible that I may have been, in a circumstantial sense, one of the reasons for his death, but again, am I to blame for having fallen in love with his wife and the wife with me?

At that he rose and, having located his service cap, set off in the direction of his colleague Sheshkovsky, where the civil servants would gather every day to play Vint and drink cold beer.

My indecision is reminiscent of Hamlet, thought Laevsky en route. How astute Shakespeare’s observation was. Oh, how astute.

III

To keep from getting bored and to accommodate the basic needs of new arrivals and those without families who had nowhere to dine due to the lack of hotels in town, Dr. Samoylenko held a kind of table d’hote at his home. At the time this was written, he had only two diners: the young zoologist Von Koren, who had traveled to the Black Sea this summer to study the embryology of jellyfish; and Deacon Pobedov, recently released from seminary and assigned to town to carry out the duties of an elderly deacon who had left to pursue medical treatment. They both paid twelve rubles per month for dinner, and Samoylenko had made them give their word of honor that they would report for dinner precisely at two o’clock.

Von Koren was typically the first to arrive. He would silently have a seat in the drawing room, and taking an album from the table, would begin to attentively survey the faded photographs of certain unidentified men in wide pants and top hats and ladies in crinoline and bonnets. Samoylenko remembered only a few of them by name, but of those he had forgotten he would sigh and say: “A splendiferous man, of superior intellect!” Having finished with the album, Von Koren would take a pistol from the shelf-stand and, squinting his left eye, aim it at a portrait of Prince Vorontsov for a long time, or he would stand before the mirror surveying his own swarthy complexion, his large forehead and his hair, black and woolly as a Negro’s, and his shirt of lackluster chintz with blossoming flowers that resembled a Persian rug, and the wide leather belt he wore instead of a waistcoat. He derived nearly as much satisfaction from scrutinizing himself as looking over the photographs or the pistol in its expensive case. He was not only very happy with his face but also with his attractively trimmed facial hair, and his broad shoulders that clearly served as a visible declaration of his good health and his solid build. He was happy with his dandyish outfit, beginning with the necktie, picked to match the color of his shirt and ending in his yellow booties.

As he was surveying the album and standing in front of the mirror, Samoylenko was in the kitchen and the vestibule beside it all the while, with no frock-coat or waistcoat on, his chest bared, worrying and drenched in sweat, fussing near the tables, preparing the salad, or some sort of sauce, or meat, cucumbers and onion for the okroshka, and still managing to angrily glare at the assisting valet and brandishing either a knife or a spoon at him.

“Bring the vinegar!” he ordered. “Or, I mean, not vinegar, olive oil!” he yelled, stomping his feet. “Where are you going, you swine?”

“For the oil, Your Excellency,” said the dumbfounded valet in a cracked tenor.

“Hurry! It’s in the cupboard! Yes, and tell Darya to add dill to the jar of pickles! Dill! Cover the sour cream, you scatterbrain, or flies will get into it!”

It seemed that the whole house shook when he yelled.