The Same Old Story

by Ivan Goncharov

  “‘It’s too much, too much!’ he said. ‘Better have some vodka! And then we’ll have some supper. Bring vodka!’ he ordered. ‘Come on, let’s go!’ he said. ‘The roast… beef… great… roast beef.’ He was laughing so hard, he could hardly get the words out. He tried to take my arm, but I tore myself away from the clutches of that monster and ran… That’s what people are like!” Alexander concluded, waved his hand and left.

  Lizaveta Alexandrovna felt sorry for Alexander: sorry for his ardent but misguided heart. She saw that with a different upbringing and a proper outlook on life, he would have been happy and capable of making someone else happy, but now he was the victim of his own blindness, and the aberrations of his own heart. He himself creates the pain in his own life. How to point his heart in the right direction? Where is the compass that can save him? She felt that only a tender, friendly hand was capable of tending that delicate flower.

  She had already once succeeded in taming the restless impulses of her nephew’s heart, but that was when it was a matter of love. In that area, she knew how to deal with a wounded heart. Like the skilled diplomat, she was the first to heap reproaches on Nadenka, and to cast her treatment of him in the worst possible light – and, by belittling her in Alexander’s eyes, she finally showed him that she was unworthy of his love. In this way, she wrenched from his heart the agonizing pain he was suffering, and replaced it with the comfortable but not entirely justified feeling of contempt. Pyotr Ivanych, on the other hand, tried to justify Nadenka’s behaviour – and by so doing, far from easing his pain, was actually making it worse, because he made him feel that it was the worthiest candidate who had been chosen.

  The friendship, however, was a different matter. Lizaveta Alexandrovna saw that Alexander’s friend, although at fault in Alexander’s eyes, was right in the eyes of most people. Just imagine trying to convince Alexander of that! She couldn’t bring herself to attempt that feat and appealed to her husband, believing, not without reason, that he would not be short of arguments against friendship.

  “Pyotr Ivanych!” she said sweetly to him one day. “I have something to ask you.”

  “What is it?”

  “Try and guess!”

  “Just tell me, you know I can refuse you nothing. It’s probably about the St Petersburg dacha; but isn’t it rather early now?…”

  “No!” said Lizaveta Alexandrovna.

  “What then?”

  “New furniture?”

  She shook her head.

  “I’m sorry, but I really don’t know,” said Pyotr Ivanych. “Why don’t you just take this pawn ticket and do whatever you like with the proceeds? It’s yesterday’s winnings…”

  He started to take out his wallet.

  “No, don’t bother, put your money back,” said Lizaveta Alexandrovna. “What I am asking won’t cost you a copeck…”

  “Not taking money when it’s offered!” said Pyotr Ivanych, putting back his wallet. “Unheard of! What is it you want?”

  “Just a little of your goodwill…”

  “Take as much as you want.”

  “Well, you see, the other day Alexander came to see me—”

  “Oh dear! I don’t think I’m going to like this!” Pyotr Ivanych cut in. “Well?”

  “He’s so depressed,” Lizaveta Alexandrovna continued, “and I’m afraid of what he might do…”

  “Now, what’s the matter with him? He hasn’t been let down by some other woman he’s fallen in love with, has he?”

  “No, it’s about a friend.”

  “A friend! It gets worse by the minute. So, what about this friend? I’m curious, please tell me.”

  “It’s like this.”

  And Lizaveta Alexandrovna proceeded to tell him everything that her nephew had told her. Pyotr Ivanych shrugged his shoulders emphatically.

  “But what do you want me to do about it? You know how he is!”

  “Just show him some understanding and ask him how he feels inside.”

  “No, you should be the one to ask him.”

  “Try talking to him – how shall I put it?… more sympathetically, instead of in your usual manner… Don’t make fun of his feelings…”

  “You’re not asking me to cry, I hope?”

  “Well, it wouldn’t hurt.”

  “Anyway, what use would it be?”

  “A great deal of use… and not just to him…” Lizaveta Alexandrovna muttered under her breath.

  “What?” asked Pyotr Ivanych.

  She said nothing.

  “Oh, that Alexander, he’s a real pain in the…” said Pyotr Ivanych, pointing to the neck in question.

  “How exactly has he been such a burden to you?”

  “What do you mean, ‘how’? I’ve had to deal with him for six years now; if it’s not that he’s in tears and needs comforting, I also have to keep writing to his mother.”

  “Oh dear, you poor thing! How trying for you! What a frightful bother! To have to get a letter once a month from the old lady and throw it into the waste-paper basket without reading it – or actually to have to talk to your nephew! Of course, I know it means taking you away from your whist! Men, men! If there’s a good dinner, Lafite with the gold seal followed by cards – then absolutely nothing or anybody else matters! And if it gives you a chance to pontificate and show how clever you are – then you’re happy!”

  “Just the way it is with you when you have the chance to flirt,” Pyotr Ivanych retorted. “To each his own, my dear! So what else?”

  “What else, you ask. Why, the heart, of course! But never a word about that.”

  “And I should think not!”

  “Oh, we’re so clever – not for us to bother with such frivolities, oh no! We’re in charge of people’s destinies. What matters to us is how much a man has in his pocket, or what decoration he wears in his buttonhole, and nothing else is worthy of our attention. We want everyone to be like them, and if among them there happens to be one single sensitive soul, capable of loving and being loved…”

  “Well, he didn’t exactly do a wonderful job of being loved by that… what’s-her-name… Verochka or whatever?”

  “Well, look who he is putting on an equal footing with him! It’s one of fate’s little jokes. It’s almost as if fate were mischievously pairing up a tender, sensitive soul with a block of ice! Poor Alexander. His trouble is that his mind and heart are out of step with each other, and that’s why he is condemned by people whose minds have outrun their hearts, people who favour reason over feeling whatever the situation…”

  “But you must agree that that’s the important thing, otherwise—”

  “No, I will never agree with that, not for the world. It may be important there at your factory, but you’re forgetting that people also have feelings…”

  “Well, five, if you mean the senses!” said Aduyev. “I learnt that way back when I was learning my ABC.”

  “And how distressing that is!” whispered Lizaveta Alexandrovna.

  “There, there, no need to get upset; I’ll do whatever you say, but first you have to give me my instructions,” said Pyotr Ivanych.

  “Well, talk to him nicely…”

  “Give him a talking to? Certainly, that’s what I’m good at.”

  “Here you go with your ‘talking to’! I want you to tell him as nicely as possible what to ask and expect of the friends he has now, and in particular that his friend’s behaviour wasn’t as bad as he thinks… Anyway, why am I telling you this? You’re so intelligent, you know how to talk people round,” said Lizaveta Alexandrovna.

  At this last phrase, Pyotr Ivanych’s brow crinkled.

  “After all those heart-to-heart talks you must have had with him,” he said irritably, “and all that whispering that went on, you still didn’t manage to exhaust the topic of love and friendship – and now you
want to get me involved…”

  “But it will be for the last time,” said Lizaveta Alexandrovna. “I’m hoping that after that he’ll feel better about things.”

  Pyotr Ivanych shook his head doubtfully.

  “Does he have any money?” he asked. “Perhaps he doesn’t and, well…”

  “Can’t you think of anything except money! He would be ready to give up all the money he has for a pleasant word from a friend.”

  “Well, isn’t that just like him! It doesn’t surprise me. Once he gave money to a colleague in his department for just that kind of effusive outpouring… But someone’s ringing, could it be him? What should I do? Tell me again – give him a talking to… or what else? Money?”

  “What do you mean ‘a talking to’? That way, you’ll make things even worse. I asked you to talk to him about friendship, about matters of the heart – but don’t be hard on him, be more considerate!”

  Alexander entered, bowed silently and, equally silently, ate a hearty dinner, and between courses rolled scraps of bread into little balls and inspected the bottles and carafes without raising his eyes. After dinner, just as he was picking up his hat, Pyotr Ivanych spoke up.

  “Where are you off to?” he asked. “Why don’t you stay a while?”

  Still silent, Alexander obeyed. Pyotr Ivanych tried to think how to approach the task in a more agreeable and more tactful manner, and suddenly burst out abruptly with: “I understand, Alexander, that your friend treated you rather off-handedly?”

  At these unexpected words, Alexander’s head snapped back as if he had been wounded, and he aimed a look full of reproach at his aunt. She too had been taken aback by this abrupt approach, and for a moment kept her head buried in her work, and then she too looked reproachfully at her husband, but he was in the double grip of digestion and sleepiness, and the two glances bounced off him.

  Alexander responded to his question with the faintest of sighs.

  “That really wasn’t very nice of him. What kind of friend is that! He hadn’t seen his friend for five years, and couldn’t even bring himself to give him a hug when they met, and just casually invited him round one evening and asked him to play cards… and offered him food. And then even worse, noticing how miserable his friend was looking, he went on to ask him about what he was doing, and his circumstances and if there was anything he needed – what insufferable curiosity! And then on top of it all – the very height of insincerity! – he had the nerve to offer his services… help… maybe even money, but absolutely no thought of heartfelt outpourings. Terrible! Terrible! I would like to see this monster myself, bring him round for dinner on Friday. Oh, and ask him what stakes he plays for.”

  “I don’t know,” Alexander responded angrily. “Laugh away, Uncle; you’re right: I’m the only one who is to blame. To trust people, to look for sympathy – from whom? To bare my heart – to whom? I was surrounded by meanness, cravenness, pettiness, but I held on to my faith in good, valour and constancy…”

  Pyotr Ivanych’s head had begun to nod in a kind of regular rhythm.

  “Pyotr Ivanych!” Lizaveta Alexandrovna whispered to him, tugging at his sleeve. “Are you sleeping?”

  “What, me sleeping!” he said, now fully awake. “But I heard everything you said: ‘valour, constancy’. How could I have been sleeping?”

  “Don’t bother my uncle, ma tante!” said Alexander. “He won’t go to sleep: it will upset his stomach, and God knows what will happen then. He may be the master of the universe, but he’s also the slave of his stomach.”

  He tried to produce a bitter smile, but somehow it came out sour.

  “Tell me what it was that you wanted from your friend? A sacrifice of some kind – like climbing up a wall, or throwing himself out of the window? What’s your understanding of friendship – what does it mean to you?” asked Pyotr Ivanych.

  “Don’t worry, I’m not asking for any sacrifice now. It’s thanks to my experience of people that my notion of friendship and of love has sunk to such a low level. Here are some lines I always carry with me and which have always seemed to me to convey the truest definition of those two emotions, and it is the way I have always understood them – and is what they should be. I now see that that notion was false: it slanders people and betrays a pitiful ignorance of their hearts. People are not capable of such feelings. But no! I repudiate these treacherous words.”

  He took his wallet out of his pocket, and from it two sheets of paper which had been written on.

  “What’s that?” asked his uncle. “Show me!”

  “It’s not worth it!” said Alexander, and was about to tear them up.

  “Read them, read them!” said Lizaveta Alexandrovna.

  “This is how two of the latest French novelists have defined true love and friendship, and I agreed with them, thinking that I would encounter these two entities in real life, and that I would find in them… whatever!” And with a gesture of contempt, he started to read: ‘Do not love with that false, timorous amiability which lives in our gilt palaces, which surrenders to a handful of gold and which fears the ambiguous word, but with that powerful affection which repays blood with blood, which manifests itself in battle and bloodshed, amidst the roar of the cannon and the thunder of the storm, when friends kiss, mouth to powder-blackened mouth, and smear each other with blood when they embrace, and when Pylades lies mortally wounded, and Orestes takes leave of him with a faithful thrust of his dagger in order to put him out of his misery, swears a terrifying oath to avenge his death and, after honouring this oath, wipes away his tear and finds repose—’”*

  Pyotr Ivanych broke into his own kind of restrained laughter.

  “Who are you laughing at, Uncle?” asked Alexander.

  “At the author, if he wrote that in all seriousness, and was speaking for himself – and also at you if that is really the way you understood friendship.”

  “And to you that was nothing but ridiculous?” asked Lizaveta Alexandrovna.

  “Nothing but. And I’m sorry, but pitiful as well as ridiculous. And, by the way, Alexander agreed by allowing himself to laugh too. As he himself just acknowledged, this idea of friendship was false and slandered people – and that is a step in the right direction.”

  “But a lie only because people cannot rise to the level of friendship as it should be properly understood…”

  “Well, if people are incapable of doing that, then that definition of friendship must be wrong…” said Pyotr Ivanych.

  “But there have been examples…”

  “They are exceptions, and exceptions are almost always bad. Bloodied embraces, terrifying oaths, thrusts of a dagger!…” And he burst out laughing again. “Now read what it says about love,” he continued. “I’m not even sleepy any more…”

  “Well, by all means, if it will give you another opportunity to have a good laugh,” said Alexander, and proceeded to read the following:

  “‘To love means no longer belonging to yourself, to stop living for yourself, to live inside the skin of another, to concentrate all your human feelings, hope, fear, sorrow and pleasure, on a single object; to love means to live in perpetual—’”

  “What the devil does all that mean?” Pyotr Ivanych cut in. “What a slew of words!”

  “No, it’s very good! I like it,” said Lizaveta Alexandrovna. “Read some more, Alexander.”

  He continued reading: “‘To know no limits to feeling, to devote oneself to a single being, to live and think only for its happiness, to find great heights in being brought low, pleasure in sorrow, and sorrow in pleasure, to give oneself up to every possible pair of opposite extremes, except love and hate. To love means to live in an ideal world…’”

  At this Pyotr Ivanych shook his head.

  Alexander went on: “‘In an ideal world where radiance and splendour reign supreme, all radiance is splendour. In this world, th
e sky appears purer, nature more luxuriant; life and time are divided in two – presence and absence. There are two seasons – spring and winter: spring belongs to the former and winter to the latter, because no matter how beautiful the flowers and how pure the azure of the sky, in the time of absence the splendour of both is dimmed; in the whole world to see only one being, and in that one being embrace the whole universe… Finally, to love is to catch every glance of the beloved, as the Bedouin catch every drop of dew to moisten their parched lips; in the absence of that being, to be assailed by a swarm of thoughts, and in its presence to be unable to utter a single one; to strive to outdo each other in serving and pleasing—”