Fifty-Two Stories

Volodya went to the medicine chest, knelt by it, and started rummaging through vials and boxes of medications. His hands trembled, and in his chest and stomach there was a feeling as if cold waves were running all through his insides. The smell of ether, carbolic acid, and various herbs, which his trembling hands seized and crumbled without any need, stifled him and made his head spin.

“Maman seems to have gone,” he thought. “That’s good…good…”

“Why so slow?” Nyuta asked, drawing out the words.

“Right away…This seems to be morphine…,” said Volodya, having read the word “morph…” on one of the labels. “Here you are!”

Nyuta stood in the doorway so that one foot was in the corridor, the other in his room. She was straightening her hair, which was hard to do—so thick and long it was!—and looking absently at Volodya. In an ample blouse, sleepy, with loose hair, in the scant light that came into the room from the white but not yet sunlit sky, Volodya found her fascinating, resplendent…Enchanted, trembling all over, recalling with pleasure how he had embraced that wonderful body in the gazebo, he handed her the drops and said:

“You’re so…”

“What?”

She came into the room.

“What?” she asked, smiling.

He said nothing and looked at her, then, as before in the gazebo, took her by the arm…And she looked at him, smiled, and waited for what would come next.

“I love you…,” he whispered.

She stopped smiling, pondered, and said:

“Wait, I think someone’s coming. Oh, these schoolboys!” she said in a low voice, went to the door, and peeked out to the corridor. “No, nobody to be seen…”

She came back…

Then it seemed to Volodya that the room, Nyuta, the dawn, and his own self—all merged into one sensation of keen, extraordinary, unheard-of happiness, for which one could give one’s whole life and go to eternal torment, but half a minute went by and it all suddenly vanished. Volodya saw only a plump, unattractive face, distorted by an expression of disgust, and he himself suddenly felt a loathing for what had happened.

“Anyhow I must go,” said Nyuta, looking Volodya over squeamishly. “What an unattractive, pathetic…phoo, an ugly duckling!”

How repulsive her long hair, her ample blouse, her footsteps, her voice now seemed to Volodya!…

“ ‘Ugly duckling,’ ” he thought after she left. “In fact, I am ugly…Everything’s ugly.”

Outside the sun was already rising, the birds sang loudly; the gardener’s footsteps were heard in the garden and the creaking of his wheelbarrow…A little later came the mooing of cows and the sounds of a shepherd’s pipe. The sunlight and the sounds were saying that somewhere in this world there exists a pure, refined, poetic life. But where is it? Neither maman nor all those people around him had ever spoken of it to Volodya.

When a lackey came to wake him up for the morning train, he pretended to be asleep…

“Ah, to hell with it all!” he thought.

He got up between ten and eleven. Brushing his hair before the mirror and looking at his unattractive face, pale after a sleepless night, he thought:

“Quite right…an ugly duckling.”

When maman saw him and was horrified that he was not at the examination, Volodya said:

“I overslept, maman…But don’t worry, I’ll present a medical excuse.”

Madame

Shumikhin and Nyuta woke up at noon. Volodya heard M-me Shumikhin noisily open her window and Nyuta responding to her coarse voice with ringing laughter. He saw the door open and a string of nieces and spongers (maman in the crowd of the latter) come filing out of the drawing room for lunch. He saw Nyuta’s washed, laughing face, and next to her face the black eyebrows and beard of the just-arrived architect.

Nyuta was wearing a Ukrainian costume, which did not suit her at all and made her ungainly; the architect’s jokes were trite and flat; in the beef patties served at lunch there was far too much onion—so it seemed to Volodya. It also seemed to him that Nyuta guffawed loudly on purpose and kept glancing in his direction to let him know that the memory of the night before did not trouble her in the least and that she did not notice the ugly duckling’s presence at the table.

At three o’clock Volodya rode to the station with maman. The sordid memories, the sleepless night, the impending expulsion from school, the pangs of conscience—it all now aroused in him a heavy, dark anger. He looked at maman’s gaunt profile, at her little nose, at the rain cape Nyuta had given her, and muttered:

“Why do you use powder? At your age it’s unbecoming! You prettify yourself, you don’t pay your card debts, you smoke other people’s cigarettes…disgusting! I don’t love you…don’t love you!”

He insulted her, and she rolled her frightened eyes, clasped her little hands, and whispered in horror:

“What are you saying, dear? My God, the coachman will hear you! Be quiet, or the coachman will hear you! He can hear everything!”