Fifty-Two Stories

“Very nice! Sit down!” Vorotov said breathlessly, concealing the collar of his nightshirt with his hand. (To breathe more easily, he always worked in his nightshirt.) “Pyotr Sergeich sent you to me? Yes, yes…I asked him…Very glad!”

While making arrangements with Mlle Enquête, he kept glancing at her shyly and with curiosity. She was a real Frenchwoman, very graceful and still very young. From her pale and languid face, her short, curly hair, and unnaturally slim waist, he could give her no more than eighteen years; but looking at her broad, well-developed shoulders, her beautiful back and stern eyes, Vorotov thought she was certainly no less than twenty-three, maybe even all of twenty-five; but then again it seemed to him that she was only eighteen. Her expression was cold, businesslike, as in someone who has come to discuss money. She never once smiled or frowned, and only once did perplexity flicker on her face, when she learned that she was being invited not to teach children, but a grown-up, fat man.

“So, Alisa Osipovna,” Vorotov said to her, “we’ll study every day from seven to eight in the evening. As concerns your wish to receive one rouble per lesson, I have no objection. If it’s a rouble, it’s a rouble…”

He also asked her if she wanted tea or coffee, if it was nice out, and with a good-natured smile, stroking the felt desktop with his palm, he affably inquired who she was, where she had studied, and how she earned her living.

Alisa Osipovna, with a cold, businesslike expression, replied that she had finished her studies in a private boarding school and had a license as a tutor, that her father had died recently of scarlet fever, that her mother was alive and made silk flowers, that she, Mlle Enquête, was employed in a private boarding school until lunchtime, and after lunch, until evening, went around to respectable homes and gave lessons.

She left, and behind her lingered the light, very delicate fragrance of a woman’s dress. Vorotov spent a long time afterwards not working, but sitting at his desk, stroking the green felt with his palms, and reflecting.

“It’s very pleasant to see girls who earn their crust of bread,” he thought. “On the other hand, it’s very unpleasant to see that need doesn’t spare even such elegant and pretty girls as this Alisa Osipovna, and that she, too, has to struggle for existence. Too bad!…”

He, who had never seen a virtuous Frenchwoman, also thought that this elegantly dressed Alisa Osipovna, with her well-developed shoulders and exaggeratedly slender waist, in all probability did something else besides teach.

The next evening, when the clock showed five minutes to seven, Alisa Osipovna came in, rosy from the cold; she opened Margot,²

which she had brought with her, and began without any preliminaries:

“In French grammar is twenty-six letters. First letter is called A, second B…”

“Excuse me,” Vorotov interrupted her, smiling. “I must warn you, mademoiselle, that you will have to change your method slightly to teach me. The thing is that I know Russian, Latin, and Greek very well…I studied comparative linguistics, and it seems to me that we can skip Margot and go directly to reading some author.”

And he explained to the Frenchwoman how grown-up people study languages.

“An acquaintance of mine,” he said, “wishing to learn new languages, placed French, German, and Latin gospels before him and read them in parallel, analyzing each word meticulously—and what then? He achieved his goal in less than a year. Let’s do the same. We’ll take some author and read him.”

The Frenchwoman looked at him in perplexity. Apparently Vorotov’s suggestion seemed quite naïve and absurd to her. If this strange suggestion had been made by an underage person, she would probably have gotten angry and scolded him, but since this was a grown-up and extremely fat man, whom she could not scold, she merely gave a barely noticeable shrug and said:

“As you wish.”

Vorotov rummaged in his bookcase and took from it a tattered French book.

“Will this do?” he asked.

“It makes no difference.”

“In that case let’s begin. Lord bless us. We’ll begin with the title…Mémoires.”

“Reminiscences…,” Mlle Enquête translated.

“Reminiscences…,” Vorotov repeated.

Smiling good-naturedly and breathing heavily, he spent a quarter of an hour on the word mémoires, and as long again on the word de, and this wore Alisa Osipovna out. She answered his questions listlessly, became confused, and apparently had a poor understanding of her pupil and did not try to understand him. Vorotov asked her questions, and meanwhile kept looking at her blond head and thinking:

“Her hair isn’t naturally curly, she curls it. Amazing! She works from morning to night, and still has time to curl her hair.”