Fifty-Two Stories

The son waved his hand, just like his father, and ran outside. Shiryaev’s house stood isolated by a gully that cut through the steppe for three miles. Its edges were overgrown with young oaks and alders, and a stream ran along the bottom. One side of the house looked onto the gully, the other onto the open field. There were no wooden or wattle fences. Instead there were all sorts of outbuildings, pressing close to each other as they surrounded the small space in front of the house, which was considered the yard and where chickens, ducks, and pigs walked about.

Having gone outside, the student went down the muddy road to the field. A penetrating autumnal dampness filled the air. The road was muddy, little puddles glistened here and there, and from the grass of the yellow field peered autumn itself: dismal, putrid, dark. On the right side of the road was a kitchen garden, all dug up, gloomy, with occasional sunflowers rising from it, their downcast heads already black.

Pyotr thought it would not be a bad thing to go to Moscow on foot, to go as he was, without a hat, in tattered boots, and without a kopeck. At the hundredth mile, his dishevelled and frightened father would catch up with him, start begging him to come back or to accept the money, but he would not even glance at him, and would keep going, going…Bare forests would be supplanted by dismal fields, the fields by forests; soon the earth would turn white with the first snow and the streams would be covered with sheet ice…Somewhere near Kursk or Serpukhov, exhausted and starving, he would fall down and die. His body would be found, and in all the newspapers the report would appear that in such-and-such place the student so-and-so had died of hunger…

A white dog with a dirty tail, who had been wandering about the kitchen garden looking for something, glanced at him and trudged after him…

He walked along the road and thought about his death, about his family’s grief, his father’s moral torment, and at the same time he pictured to himself all sorts of adventures on the road, one more whimsical than the other, picturesque places, scary nights, chance encounters. He imagined a procession of women pilgrims, a hut in the forest with one little window, which shone brightly in the darkness; he stands by the window, asks for a night’s lodging…they let him in and—suddenly he sees robbers. Or better still: he comes upon a big manor house, where, on learning who he is, they give him food and drink, play the piano for him, listen to his complaints, and the owner’s beautiful daughter falls in love with him.

Preoccupied with his grief and similar thoughts, young Shiryaev kept walking and walking…Far, far ahead against a background of gray clouds an inn appeared darkly; still further beyond the inn, right on the horizon, a small bump could be seen; that was the railroad station. This bump reminded him of the connection that existed between the place where he now stood and Moscow, in which streetlights burned, carriages rattled, lectures were given. He nearly burst into tears from anguish and impatience. This solemn nature with its order and beauty, this deathly silence all around, disgusted him to the point of despair, of hatred!

“Watch out!” he heard a loud voice behind him.

An old lady landowner of his acquaintance drove by him in a light, elegant landau. He bowed to her and smiled with his whole face. And he immediately caught himself in this smile, which did not go at all with his dark mood. Where had it come from, if his whole soul was filled with vexation and anguish?

And he thought that nature herself probably gave man this ability to lie, so that even in difficult moments of inner tension he could keep the secrets of his nest, the way a fox or a wild duck keeps them. Every family has its joys and its horrors, but however great they are, it is hard for an outsider’s eye to see them; they are secret. For instance, on account of some falsehood, the father of the lady landowner who had just driven by bore the wrath of Tsar Nicholas for half his life, her husband had been a gambler, of her four sons not one of them had made anything of himself. One can imagine how many terrible scenes took place in her family, how many tears were shed. And yet the old woman seemed happy, content, and responded to his smile with a smile. The student remembered his friends who talked reluctantly about their families, remembered his mother, who almost always lied when she had to talk about her husband and children…

Until nightfall Pyotr walked around on roads far from home, abandoning himself to cheerless thoughts. When rain began to sprinkle, he headed for home. On his way back, he decided to talk with his father at all costs, to make him understand once and for all that it was difficult and frightening to live with him.