The Same Old Story

by Ivan Goncharov

  He was afraid of wanting things, knowing that at the very moment when what you wished for is in your grasp, fate will snatch it from you and present you with something quite different, which you have absolutely no desire for – something utterly worthless to you; and even if, finally, fate does give you what you want, it is only after it has tormented you, exhausted you and humiliated you in your own eyes that fate tosses it to you, like a scrap of food to a dog, after making it crawl to that tasty morsel, gaze at it, sniff at it, drag it into the dust and stand on its hind legs; only then, at its master’s command, “Take!…”

  He was daunted by the fact that in life happiness and unhappiness alternated like the ebb and flow of the tide. Joy of any kind was something he did not anticipate, but he did view suffering as inevitable – no way of avoiding it. All were subject to the same law and, as he saw it, were assigned their due share of happiness and unhappiness. His own share of happiness had been exhausted – happiness which happened to be fraudulent and illusory. Only suffering was real, and lay ahead. It might mean illness, old age, loss of various kinds, maybe even poverty. All these “blows of fate”, as his aunt used to call them back in the village, lay in store for him, but what about delight? His lofty poetic aspirations had let him down – instead an onerous burden, known as duty, had been laid on him! What remained were only the most banal of benefits – money, creature comforts and promotions… Who cares about such things? But oh, how depressing it was to contemplate life, to understand what it was, but not to understand why it existed!

  He continued to brood, and saw no escape from his flurry of doubts. His experiences had only crushed him, but to no good purpose, and had not made his life any healthier, had not cleared the air in it, and had not shed light on it. He didn’t know what to do. He tossed from side to side on the divan and started reviewing the people he knew – which made him feel even worse. One was making an excellent career, had earned a great reputation as an able administrator and had become something of a public figure; another had acquired a family and chosen a quiet life in preference to all the banal prizes the world had to offer: he envied no one and coveted nothing; a third one… But why go on? They had all made their mark in one way or another and had settled down, and were following a path they had clearly marked out for themselves.

  “I am the only one who… but what exactly am I?”

  He started to interrogate himself; could he have become an administrator, a squadron commander? Could he have settled for a family life? And he realized that he would not have been content with the life of any of the three. There was some kind of imp stirring within him, constantly whispering that all that was beneath him, and that he should be aiming higher. But where and how, he could not fathom. He turned out to have been wrong about becoming a writer. “But what to do? Where to start?” he kept on asking himself, but didn’t know what to answer. His exasperation kept on gnawing away at him. “Well, let’s say, even being an administrator, or a squadron commander… But no, it’s too late for that. Have to go back to square one.”

  Despair simply squeezed tears out of his eyes – tears of exasperation, envy, hostility towards everyone – the most painful of tears. He bitterly regretted not having listened to his mother and having bolted from his remote backwater in the country.

  “Mummy sensed in her heart the pain that was in store for me in the future,” he thought. If I had stayed there, these restless impulses would have slumbered, never to be awakened; there would have been none of the turmoil and ferment of that other busy and many-faceted life. At the same time, I would have been visited by all the human feelings and passions – self-esteem, pride and ambition, but on a smaller scale – and they would only have affected me within the limited confines of our remote district – and would all have been easier to consummate. Number one in the district! Yes, everything is relative. If I had stayed, that divine spark of heavenly fire which burns in varying degrees in all of us would have flashed in me unnoticed and would have been swiftly snuffed out in that uneventful style of life, or would have been ignited by my attachment to my wife and children. My existence would not have been poisoned. I would have performed proudly the role assigned to me, and my path in life would have been a quiet one, seemingly simple and easy to understand: it would have been a life well within my powers, and I would have been equal to all its struggles. And love? It would have flowered into a full-blown blossom and filled my whole life. Sofia would have loved me in a quiet way. I would have lost faith in nothing, and plucked only roses, without ever encountering thorns. I would never even have felt any jealousy – if only for lack of competition. What was it, then, which drew me so powerfully and blindly into the far distance, into a fog, and into an unknown and unequal struggle with fate? And how wonderfully I understood both life and people then! And that’s how wonderfully I would have understood them today, without really understanding anything. Then, I expected so much from life, without ever having taken a close look at it, and would still be there expecting something more to this very day. How many treasures I had discovered within me – and what has become of them? I have squandered them all over the place. I parted with my open-hearted sincerity, my first precious passion – in return for what? Bitter disillusionment; I learnt that everything is a sham, nothing endures, and that nothing and no one can be relied on – neither myself, nor others – and I grew wary of others and myself. In the grip of this negative world view, I was unable to appreciate the smaller things of life, and be content with them, like my uncle and others like him… And now!…”

  Now, there was only one thing he wanted: to forget the past, to recover his peace of mind, to rest his soul. He distanced himself from life more and more, and observed it through sleepy eyes. In crowds, at noisy gatherings, he found only boredom, and fled from them, but the boredom followed him. He marvelled at the way people could enjoy themselves, constantly busy themselves with one thing or another, and every day find new interests to entertain them. It seemed strange to him that people weren’t sleepwalking or crying the way he was, and that they preferred to chatter about the weather instead of how badly they felt and their sufferings – and even if they did, it would be about how badly their legs or some other part of their body felt – rheumatism, haemorrhoids and the like. It was only their bodies which could worry them, but never a word about what was troubling them in their minds and hearts! “What insignificant, empty creatures people are, more like animals!” he thought. Yet sometimes he would fall to thinking deeply along these disturbing lines: “There are so many of them, these insignificant people, and I am just one person – can it really be that… all of them are the empty ones… that they are wrong… and I?…”

  At these times, it would occur to him that he alone might be in the wrong, and this thought would make him even more miserable.

  He stopped seeing his old friends, and whenever a new person came anywhere near him he felt chilled to his marrow. After his conversation with his uncle, he sank even deeper into his apathetic stupor; it was as if his very soul had gone into hibernation. He was immured in a stony-faced indifference, and lived a life of total indolence, studiously distancing himself from anything that might remind him of civilization.

  “It doesn’t matter how you spend your life, so long as you live,” he would say. “Everyone is free to understand life any way he wants; and then, when you die…”

  He would seek the company of the embittered, the malevolent and malcontent, to unburden himself to them, and to hear them jeer at fate; or he would frequent his intellectual and social inferiors, mostly in the person of old Kostyakov, whom Zayezzhalov had wanted to introduce to Pyotr Ivanych.

  Kostyakov lived in Peski and walked about in his street in a shiny leather hat and a dressing gown, using a handkerchief as a belt. He had a woman who cooked for him living in his flat, with whom he played cards in the evenings. Whenever a fire broke out he was the first on the scene and the last to leave. Whenever he
passed a church where a funeral service was being held, he would elbow his way through the crowd to look at the face of the deceased and accompany the hearse all the way to the cemetery. Indeed, he was fascinated by ceremonies of every kind, both festive and solemn. He loved being an eyewitness to untoward events of every kind, like fights, accidental deaths, collapse of ceilings, etc., and took special pleasure in reading accounts of such happenings in the newspapers. In addition, he read medical textbooks, as he put it, “in order to find out what people had inside them”. In the winter Alexander would play draughts with him, and go fishing in the country with him in the summer. The old man could converse on a range of subjects. When they were out in the country, he would talk about grain and other crops; by the river it would be about fish or shipping; in the street, he would comment on the houses, on building, materials and prices… but he never had anything to say about abstractions. He viewed life as a good thing when there was money, and vice versa. Someone of this kind posed no threat to Alexander, and was incapable of ruffling his feelings.

  Alexander strove zealously to mortify everything spiritual or emotional in his make up, just as hermits make a practice of mortifying their flesh. In the office, he was taciturn, and when he ran into people he knew, he fobbed them off with just a couple of words with the excuse that he was in a hurry and took off. But his friend Kostyakov he saw every day. Either the old man would spend that day at Alexander’s place or he would invite Aduyev home for cabbage soup. He had already taught Alexander how to brew his own liqueur, how to make hotpot and cook tripe. Then they would go somewhere in the neighbouring countryside not too far from the city. Wherever they went they would meet a lot of people Kostyakov knew. With the menfolk he would chat about everyday matters, and he would joke with the women – just like the clown he had been described as being by Zayezzhalov when he had offered to introduce him. Alexander was happy to let him do most of the talking, while he himself remained mainly silent.

  He had already begun to feel that the ideas of the world he had abandoned now rarely visited him and revolved more slowly in his head – and, finding nothing in the vicinity to echo or resist them, never made it as far as his tongue and simply withered away without blossoming. His heart had grown wild and empty, like an overgrown garden which has been abandoned. He was within an ace of becoming totally fossilized, and in just a few more months… it would have been “goodbye!” But this is what happened.

  Once Alexander and Kostyakov were out fishing. Kostyakov was wearing a long coat and a peaked cap, and had set up a number of rods of varying lengths on the bank of the river, and also ledger lines, with floats and bells of different sizes. He was smoking a short pipe and, without daring to blink, was keeping a close eye on the small regiment of rods and lines, including Aduyev’s, because Alexander was leaning up against a tree, looking in the other direction. They had been standing there in silence for some time.

  “Did you get a bite? Take a look, Alexander Fyodorych,” Kostyakov whispered to him.

  Alexander looked into the water, and turned back to Kostyakov, saying, “No, it was just a ripple that you saw.”

  “No, look, look!” Kostyakov shouted. “Good God! It’s a bite, yes, a bite! Come on, pull, pull! Don’t let go!”

  And indeed the float had disappeared underwater, pulling the line after it and dragging the rod from where it was planted among the bushes. Alexander grabbed the rod, and then the line.

  “Easy, easy! Don’t pull so hard!… What are you doing? Not like that!” Kostyakov shouted, promptly taking hold of the line.

  “Goodness! What a weight! Don’t jerk it! Just ease it in or you’ll break the line. Like this; left and right, left and right, and bring it in to the bank! Step back! A little more! Now, pull, but don’t tug – like this, like this!…”

  A huge pike surfaced. It quickly coiled itself into a ring, its silvery scales sparkling, and lashed its tail back and forth, splashing both of them. Kostyakov turned pale.

  “What a pike!” he shouted, awestruck, and stretched his arms out into the water. Stumbling over his rod, he caught hold of the pike with both hands as it twisted and turned out of the water. “Look! It’s squirming like the devil! Wow! What a specimen!”

  “Wow, indeed!” someone repeated behind him.

  Alexander turned round. Standing two steps away stood an old man with a pretty young girl on his arm. She was tall, her head was uncovered and she carried a small umbrella. She was frowning slightly, and bending slightly forward, following intently Kostyakov’s every movement, without even noticing Alexander.

  Aduyev was startled by this sudden arrival, and let go of the rod. The pike dropped back into the water with a thud and, swinging its tail gracefully from side to side, hurtled deeper into the water, trailing the line in its wake. All this happened in a split second.

  “Alexander Fyodorych! How could you?” Kostyakov shouted in a fury, and seized the line and pulled it back in, but was left holding the severed end of it – minus the hook and the pike.

  All pale, he turned to Alexander, showing him the end of the line, and looked daggers at him for a minute in silence, and then spat.

  “I’m never going fishing with you again, come hell or high water!” he snapped, and went off to his rods.

  Meanwhile the young girl had noticed that Alexander was looking at her, and she blushed and stepped back. The old man, apparently her father, bowed to Aduyev, who bowed sullenly in response, threw down his rod and sat down about a dozen steps farther away.

  “More trouble in the offing!” he thought. “Oedipus and Antigone,* all over again! Another woman! My God! They’re everywhere – no getting away from them!”

  “Some fisherman you are!” Kostyakov was saying, putting away his rods and giving Alexander a baleful look every now and then. “You, go fishing? You’d be better off sitting at home on your divan, trying to catch mice, but fishing? Forget it! How can you catch fish, when you let them slip through your hands? It was practically ready for us to eat, almost cooking on the stove! It would have been a miracle if you hadn’t let it slip off your plate!”

  “Are they biting?” asked the old man.

  “Well, you see,” Kostyakov replied, “here I had six rods going, and didn’t even get a pitiful tickle from a lousy little ruff, but meanwhile over there – not surprising if it had been the ground line – but the one with the float – what a piece of luck! A pike weighing about ten pounds, and then he let it get away. People say ‘the hunter makes his own luck’! Not in my book! Why, if it had tried to get away from me, I would have grappled with it in the water – as it was, the pike practically gave itself up, but we’re asleep – and people like that call themselves fishermen! Is that what fishermen are like? Not on your life! A real fisherman, even if someone fires a cannon right next to him, doesn’t even blink. That’s a real fisherman for you! And you think you’re going to catch fish!”

  Meanwhile the girl could see that Alexander was in every respect a totally different kind of man from Kostyakov. He was dressed differently: his build, his age, his manner and everything else was different. She could tell that he had been well educated: there was a thoughtfulness about his face, a thoughtfulness with a trace of sadness about it.

  “But why did he make off?” she wondered. “It’s strange, I don’t think there’s anything about me to make people avoid me…”

  The girl stood erect proudly, lowered her eyelashes, and then raised them again, and gave Alexander an unfriendly look.

  She was feeling annoyed. She took her father and walked haughtily past Alexander.

  Her father bowed once again to Alexander, but the daughter did not even favour him with a glance.

  “Let him know that we haven’t the slightest interest in him!” she thought, stealing a covert glance at him.

  Alexander, although he didn’t actually look at her, couldn’t help trying to look a little more attra
ctive.

  “How dare he! He doesn’t even look back!” thought the girl. “The gall of him!”

  But the very next day Kostyakov took Alexander fishing again, and thus found himself eating his own words.

  For two days they kept their distance from each other. At first, Alexander would look around apprehensively, but when he saw no one near him, he relaxed. On the third day, he pulled out a huge perch, and Kostyakov grudgingly broke the silence.

  “Yes, but it’s still not a pike!” he said with a sigh. “Good luck came your way, but you let it slip through your hands; you won’t get a second chance. And I still haven’t got a bite. Six rods, and nothing.”

  “Why don’t you ring those little bells?” said a peasant who had stopped on his way past to see how the fishing was going. “Maybe the fish will be attracted – you know – by what they think are church bells ringing?”

  Kostyakov gave him a baleful look. “Shut up, you ignorant peasant!” he said.

  The peasant moved off.

  “You blockhead!” Kostyakov shouted after him. “What else can you expect from brutes like that! Go and jeer at one of your own kind – what a nerve!”

  God help anyone who bothers a hunter just when he’s not catching anything!

  On the third day, while they were fishing in silence and watching the water intently, something rustled behind them. Alexander turned round and winced as if he had been bitten by a gnat. He saw the old man and the girl standing there. Alexander eyed them warily, barely responding to the old man’s bow, although he had been expecting this visit. Normally he went fishing dressed very casually, but this time he had put on a new overcoat and tied a blue scarf around his neck. He had combed his hair and even curled it a little, and was looking altogether like a fisherman out of an idyll. After waiting for just the length of time required by politeness, he went off and sat under a tree.