Fifty-Two Stories

He had already been outside; he was ashamed to go to his school friends. Again, beside the point, he remembered the two little English girls…He walked up and down the common room and went into Avgustin Mikhailych’s room. Here it smelled strongly of essential oils and glycerine soap. On the table, in the windows, and even on the chairs stood a multitude of bottles, little tumblers, and shot glasses with liquids of various colors. Volodya took a newspaper from the table, unfolded it, and read the title: Figaro. The newspaper had a strong and pleasant smell. Then he took a revolver from the table…

“Enough now, don’t pay any attention!” The music teacher was comforting maman in the next room. “He’s still so young! At his age men always allow themselves excesses. You must reconcile yourself to that.”

“No, Evgenia Andreevna, he’s too spoiled!” maman said in a singsong voice. “There’s no older man over him, and I’m weak and can’t do anything. No, I’m unhappy!”

Volodya put the muzzle of the revolver into his mouth, felt something like a trigger or catch, and pressed it with his finger…Then he felt some other sort of protuberance and pushed that as well. Taking the muzzle out of his mouth, he wiped it on the skirt of his overcoat and studied the lock; never before in his life had he held a weapon in his hands…

“Seems it should be raised…,” he figured. “Yes, it seems so…”

Avgustin Mikhailych came into the common room and laughingly began telling about something. Volodya again put the muzzle into his mouth, clenched it with his teeth, and pressed something with his finger. A shot rang out…Something struck Volodya in the back of the head with terrible force, and he fell onto the table, face down on the glasses and bottles. Then he saw his late father, in a top hat with a wide black band, dressed in mourning for some lady in Menton, suddenly embrace him with both arms, and they both fell into a very dark, deep abyss.

Then everything became confused and disappeared…

1887

LUCK

To Y. P. Polonsky¹

BY THE WIDE STEPPE ROAD known as the highway a herd of sheep was spending the night. It was watched over by two shepherds. One, an old man of around eighty, toothless, with a quivering face, was lying on his stomach just by the road, resting his elbows on the dusty leaves of a plantain; the other, a young fellow with bushy black eyebrows and no moustache, dressed in the burlap from which cheap sacks are made, lay on his back, his hands behind his head, looking up into the sky, where, just over his face, the Milky Way stretched and stars were drowsing.

The shepherds were not alone. Some two yards from them, in the darkness that covered the road, loomed the dark outline of a saddled horse, and beside it, leaning against the saddle, stood a man in high boots and a short jacket, by all appearances a landlord’s overseer. Judging by his erect and motionless figure, his manners, his treatment of the shepherds, the horse, he was a serious, reasonable man and knew his own worth; even in the darkness traces of military bearing were discernible in him and that grandly condescending expression which is acquired from frequent dealing with masters and stewards.

The sheep were sleeping. Against the gray background of the dawn, which was already beginning to cover the eastern part of the sky, the silhouettes of those that were not asleep could be seen; they stood with their heads lowered, thinking about something. Their thoughts, long, drawn-out, evoked only by impressions of the wide steppe and the sky, of days and nights, probably astonished and oppressed them to the point of stupefaction, and, standing now as if rooted to the spot, they noticed neither the stranger’s presence nor the restlessness of the dogs.

In the sleepy, static air hung a monotonous noise, without which there could be no summer steppe night; grasshoppers chirred incessantly, quails sang, and a half mile or so from the herd, in a ravine, where a brook flowed and pussywillows grew, young nightingales whistled languidly.

The overseer had stopped to ask the shepherds for fire to light his pipe. He silently lit up, smoked the whole pipe, then, without saying a word, leaned his elbow against the saddle and fell to thinking. The young shepherd paid no attention to him; he went on lying there and looking at the sky, but the old man studied the overseer for a long time and then asked:

“Might you be Pantelei from the Makarov estate?”

“Himself,” the overseer replied.

“Now I see. I couldn’t tell—so you’ll be a rich man.² Where did God fetch you from?”

“The Kovylevsky tract.”

“That’s far off. Is it let out for sharecropping?”

“Various things. Some for sharecropping, some on lease, some for melon patches. In fact, I just went to the mill.”