Fifty-Two Stories

“Trash!” he hissed, pacing from corner to corner. “So he got what he wanted, worthless lickspittle! Vermin! Women’s pet! Vile creature!”

The director spat loudly at the door through which Polzukhin had left, then suddenly became embarrassed, because a lady was just coming into his study, the wife of the town treasurer…

“Only a moment, a moment…,” the lady began. “Sit yourself down, my friend, and listen to me carefully…They say you have a vacancy…Tomorrow or even today a young man will come to see you, a certain Polzukhin…”

The lady went on chirping, and the director gazed at her with dull, bleary eyes, like a man who is about to fall into a faint, gazed and smiled out of politeness.

The next day, receiving Vremensky in his office, the director took a long time before venturing to tell him the truth. He hemmed and hawed, became confused, could not find where to begin, what to say. He would have liked to apologize to the teacher, to tell him the whole truth, but his tongue, like a drunk man’s, would not obey him, his ears burned, and he suddenly felt hurt and vexed at having to play such an absurd role—in his own office, before his subordinates. He suddenly pounded the table, jumped up, and shouted angrily:

“I have no post for you! None, none! Leave me alone! Don’t torment me! Let me be, finally, do me a favor!”

And he walked out of the office.

1886

ROMANCE WITH A DOUBLE BASS

THE MUSICIAN BOWSKY was walking from town to the dacha¹

of Prince Bibulov, where on the occasion of a wedding engagement an evening of music and dance was “to be held.” On his back rested an enormous double bass in a leather case. Bowsky walked beside the river, which rolled its cool waters along, if not majestically, at least quite poetically.

“Why not go for a swim?” he thought.

Without further thinking, he undressed and immersed his body in the cool stream. The evening was magnificent. Bowsky’s poetic soul began to tune in with the harmony of his surroundings. But what a sweet feeling came over his soul when, having swum some hundred yards, he saw a beautiful girl sitting on the steep bank and fishing. He held his breath and stopped under an influx of heterogeneous feelings: memories of childhood, pining for the past, awakened love…God, and here he thought he was no longer capable of love! After losing faith in humankind (his ardently loved wife had run off with his friend, the bassoon Muttkin), his breast had been filled with a sense of emptiness, and he had turned into a misanthrope.

“What is life?” he had asked himself more than once. “What do we live for? Life is a myth, a dream…ventriloquism…”

But, standing before this sleeping beauty (it was not hard to notice she was asleep), suddenly, against his will, he felt in his breast something resembling love. He stood before her for a long time, devouring her with his eyes…

“But enough…,” he thought, letting out a deep sigh. “Farewell, wondrous vision! It’s time I went to His Excellency’s ball…”

And glancing once more at the beauty, he was just about to swim back when an idea flashed in his mind.

“I must leave her something to remember me by!” he thought. “I’ll attach something to her line. It will be a surprise from ‘the unknown one.’ ”

Bowsky quietly swam to the bank, picked a big bouquet of field and water flowers, and, binding it with a stalk of goosefoot, attached it to the line.

The bouquet sank to the bottom and dragged the pretty float down with it.

Discretion, the laws of nature, and our hero’s social situation demand that the romance should end at this point, but—alas!—the author’s fate is implacable: owing to circumstances beyond his control, the romance did not end with the bouquet. Counter to common sense and the nature of things, the poor and unaristocratic double bassist was to play an important role in the life of an aristocratic and rich beauty.

Swimming to the bank, Bowsky was astounded: he did not see his clothes. They had been stolen…While he was admiring the beauty, unknown villains had stolen everything except the double bass and top hat.

“Damnation!” exclaimed Bowsky. “Oh, people, you brood of vipers! I am not so much indignant at the loss of the clothes (for clothes are perishable) as at the thought that I shall have to go naked, thereby trespassing against public morality.”

He sat down on the case of his double bass and started thinking about how to get out of his terrible situation.

“I can’t very well go naked to Prince Bibulov’s!” he thought. “There’ll be ladies there! And besides, along with my trousers, the thieves stole the rosin in my pocket!”

He thought for a long time, tormentingly, until his temples hurt.

“Hah!” he remembered at last. “In the bushes near the bank there’s a little bridge…I can sit under that little bridge until night falls, and in the evening, under cover of darkness, I’ll make my way to the nearest cottage…”