Fifty-Two Stories

Kunin silently shook Father Yakov’s hand, accompanied him to the front hall, and, going back to his study, stood by the window. He saw Father Yakov come out of the house, put on his shabby broad-brimmed hat, and, his head hanging, as if embarrassed by his own candor, slowly walk down the road.

“I don’t see his horse,” thought Kunin.

The thought that the priest had been coming to him on foot all these days frightened Kunin: Sinkovo was five or six miles away, and mud made the roads impassable. Then Kunin saw the coachman Andrei and the boy Paramon, leaping over puddles and splashing Father Yakov with mud, run up to him to receive his blessing. Father Yakov took off his hat and slowly blessed Andrei, then blessed the little boy and stroked his head.

Kunin wiped his hand over his eyes, and it seemed to him that his hand became wet from it. He stepped away from the window and passed a clouded gaze around the room, in which he could still hear the timid, stifled voice…He glanced at his desk…Fortunately, Father Yakov in his haste had forgotten to take his sermons…Kunin ran to them, tore them to shreds, and flung them under the desk in disgust.

“And I didn’t know!” he moaned, collapsing on the sofa. “I, who for more than a year have been serving here as a permanent member, an honorary justice of the peace, a member of the high school board! A blind puppet! A fop! Quickly come to their aid! Quickly!”

He thrashed about painfully, pressed his temples, and strained his mind.

“I’ll receive my salary of two hundred roubles on the twentieth…On some plausible pretext I’ll give some to him and to the doctor’s wife…I’ll invite him to offer a prayer service, and I’ll feign an illness for the doctor…That way their pride won’t be offended. And I’ll help Avramy…”

He counted his money on his fingers and was afraid to admit to himself that these two hundred roubles would barely be enough to pay the steward, the servants, the peasant who delivered meat…He could not help remembering the recent past, when he senselessly wasted his father’s wealth, when, still a twenty-year-old milksop, he gave expensive fans to prostitutes, paid the coachman Kuzma ten roubles a day, offered gifts to actresses out of vanity. Ah, how useful they would be now, all those squandered roubles, three roubles, ten roubles!

“Father Avramy can eat on only three roubles a month,” thought Kunin. “For a rouble the priest’s wife can make herself an undershirt and the doctor’s wife can hire a washerwoman. But anyhow I’ll help them! I’ll certainly help them!”

Here Kunin suddenly remembered the denunciation he had written to the bishop, and he cringed all over as if from a sudden blast of cold. This memory filled his whole soul with a sense of oppressive shame before himself and before the invisible truth…

Thus began and ended the sincere impulse towards useful activity of one of those well-intentioned but all-too-sated and unreasoning human beings.

1886

GRISHA

GRISHA, A CHUBBY LITTLE BOY, born two years and eight months ago, is strolling with his nanny along the boulevard. He is wearing a long padded coat, a scarf, a big hat with a fuzzy button, and warm galoshes. He feels stifled and hot, and the shiny April sun adds to it by shining straight into his eyes and stinging his eyelids.

His whole clumsy figure, stepping timidly and uncertainly, expresses the utmost perplexity.

Up to now Grisha has known only a rectangular world, where his bed stands in one corner, his nanny’s trunk in another, a chair in a third, and in the fourth an icon lamp burns. If you peek under the bed, you see a doll with a broken-off arm and a drum, and behind the nanny’s trunk there are a great many different things: empty spools, scraps of paper, a lidless box, and a broken toy clown. Besides the nanny and Grisha, this world is often visited by Mama and the cat. Mama looks like a doll, and the cat like Papa’s fur coat, only the fur coat has no eyes or tail. From this world, which is called the children’s room, a door leads to a space where they have dinner and drink tea. There Grisha’s chair stands on its long legs and a clock hangs, which exists only in order to swing its pendulum and chime. From the dining room you can go on to a room with red armchairs. Here there is a dark spot on the rug, for which they still shake their fingers at Grisha. Beyond this room there is yet another, where he is not allowed to go and where Papa lurks—a person mysterious in the highest degree! The nanny and Mama are understandable: they dress Grisha, feed him, and put him to bed, but what Papa exists for—nobody knows. There is yet another mysterious person—the aunt who gave Grisha the drum. She appears and then disappears. Where does she disappear to? More than once Grisha looked under the bed, behind the trunk, and under the sofa, but she was not there…