“What is to be done, doctor?” he asked, stopping suddenly in front of him.
“Go to Kissingen,”* replied the doctor, “it’s the only thing left to do, since these attacks of yours have started to recur too frequently—”
“But why are you only talking about me?” said Pyotr Ivanych, interrupting the doctor. “I’m talking to you about my wife. I’m past fifty, but she is still in her prime, and she has a life to live; and if her health has already begun to decline at this time…”
“What’s all this talk about decline?!” the doctor remarked. “I was simply telling you of my apprehensions about the future, but right now there is nothing… I was simply trying to say that her health… or her indisposition, but as it is… well, not exactly a normal condition…”
“Doesn’t it amount to the same thing? You just slipped in that comment, and you’ve also forgotten that since I’ve been watching her closely every day, I’ve been discovering more and more disquieting changes, and for the last three months I haven’t had an untroubled moment. I don’t know why I didn’t see it earlier – I just don’t understand! My official duties and other business are taking up too much of my time, and undermining my health… and now, it seems, hers too.”
He resumed his pacing of the room.
“Have you questioned her today?” he asked, after a pause.
“Yes, but she hasn’t noticed anything wrong with her. At first, I supposed that the reason might be physiological; she has had no children… but, apparently not! Perhaps the reason is purely psychological…”
“That makes it easier,” said Pyotr Ivanych.
“But perhaps there really is nothing wrong. There are definitely no suspicious symptoms. What I think is that you have been staying too long in this swampy climate. Go to the south, expose yourself to new impressions, and then see what happens. Spend the summer in Kissingen, take the waters, and then Italy in the autumn, and Paris in the winter. I can assure you that the accumulation of mucus, irritability… won’t be a trace left!”
Pyotr Ivanych was hardly listening to him.
“A psychological cause!” he muttered in an undertone, and shook his head.
“Let me tell you why I mention a psychological reason,” said the doctor. “Anyone who didn’t know you, might suspect that there were worries, or rather, not worries… but rather frustration of some kind; sometimes people have certain needs, something is missing… I just wanted to leave you with this thought—”
“Needs, frustration!” Pyotr Ivanych broke in. “Everything she desires is taken care of; I know all her tastes and habits. As for needs, hm! You’ve seen our home, you know how we live?”
“You have a wonderful home,” said the doctor, “marvellous… your cook, your cigars. But how come that friend of yours who lives in London… has stopped sending you sherry? I haven’t seen him here this year for some reason…”
“Fate is so treacherous, doctor! Could it really be that I haven’t been as careful as I should with her?” Pyotr Ivanych began more heatedly than usual. “I’ve always weighed everything so carefully, I believe, and every step I’ve taken… No, somewhere along the line something went wrong. But where? With all the success, with the career I’ve had… I don’t know!”
He waved his hand and continued to pace.
“Why are you so upset?” said the doctor. “There’s nothing at all dangerous. I can only repeat what I said the first time: that organically she is perfectly healthy, and there are no threatening symptoms. Some anaemia, a little run down – but that’s all!”
“Nothing to worry about then!” said Pyotr Ivanych.
“Ill health is a bad thing, not a good thing…” the doctor went on. “It’s not that she’s the only one. Take those outsiders who live here – what do you see when you look at them? So get away from here! And if you can’t get away, do something to bring her out of herself; don’t just leave her to sit at home: try to please her, take her places, provide more exercise for her body and spirit – they are both in a state of unnatural stagnation. Of course, in time it may affect her lungs, or…”
“Goodbye, doctor! I’m going to see her,” said Pyotr Ivanych, and hurried to his wife’s sitting room. He stopped at the door, quietly parted the curtains and gave her an anxious look.
She… well, what was it that the doctor had noticed particularly about her? Anyone seeing her for the first time would have found in her a woman like many others in St Petersburg. Pale, it is true, lustreless eyes, her blouse hanging loosely and evenly about her narrow shoulders and flat chest, her movements slow, almost sluggish. But rosy cheeks, the glitter in the eye, the liveliness of movement are hardly the hallmarks of our beauties. Neither Phidias nor Praxiteles* would have found here a Venus for their chisels. No, plasticity of beauty is not to be sought among our northern beauties: they are not statuesque, they are not given to the poses of antiquity, in which the beauty of Greek women were immortalized – indeed, the very material into which these poses were moulded is not to be found here; nor are those flawless and perfect contours of the body… Sensuality does not flow from their eyes in a hot stream; their half-opened lips do not glisten with that innocently voluptuous smile that issues from the torrid mouths of the women of the south. Our women have been endowed with another, higher form of beauty. The sculptor’s chisel cannot capture that gleam of thought in the features of their faces, that struggle of the will with passion, or the interplay between those ineffable utterances of the soul with the numberless subtle shades of wilful ambiguity, of feigned artlessness, anger and kindness, hidden joys… and sufferings – all those momentary flashes of lightning bursting forth from the concentric circles of the soul…
However that may be, the fact is that anyone seeing Lizaveta Alexandrovna for the first time would not notice any sign of discomposure. Only someone who had known her before and remembered the freshness of her face, the gleam in her eyes which had once made it difficult to discern their colour, drowned as it was by the luxuriant ripplings of its light, and who remembered her plump shoulders and shapely bosom, would look on her now with dismay – and his heart, if he were not without feeling for her, would tighten with pity, as perhaps Pyotr Ivanych’s heart did now, however reluctant he might be to admit it to himself.
He entered the room quietly and sat down beside her.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“I’m checking the household accounts,” she replied. “Would you believe, Pyotr Ivanych, last month we spent almost 1,500 roubles on food alone – it’s outrageous!”
Without saying a word, he took the ledger from her and put it on the table.
“Listen,” he began, “the doctor says that if I stay here, it will be bad for my health; his advice is to go abroad and take the waters at a spa. What do you say?”
“What do you want me to say? On something like this, what the doctor says is more important. If that’s what he advises, you have to go.”
“What about you? Would you like to go?”
“I suppose so.”
“But perhaps you would prefer to stay here for a while?”
“All right, I’ll stay here.”
“Well, which is it?” Pyotr Ivanych asked, with a trace of impatience.
“Make whatever arrangements you like for both of us,” she replied in a tone of resigned indifference. “If you say so, I’ll go – if not, I’ll stay.”
“You mustn’t stay here,” said Pyotr Ivanych. “The doctor says that the climate here isn’t good for your health either.”
“Where did he get that idea from?” said Lizaveta Alexandrovna. “I don’t feel there’s anything wrong with my health.”
“A long journey,” said Pyotr Ivanych, “might also be too tiring for you; perhaps you would like to stay for a while with your aunt in Moscow, while I’m abroad?”
“All right, then I suppose I’ll go
to Moscow.”
“Or else we could both go to the Crimea for the summer?”
“All right, let’s go to the Crimea.”
Pyotr Ivanych was losing patience. He stood up and started pacing back and forth the way he did in his study, and then stopped in front of her.
“So it doesn’t matter to you one way or the other where you are?”
“No, it doesn’t.”
“Why not?”
Without replying, she picked up the ledger from the table.
“It’s up to you, Pyotr Ivanych,” she said. “We have to cut down, I mean, 1,500 just for food…”
He took the ledger from her and threw it under the table.
“Why are you so preoccupied with that?” he asked. “Or are you worried about money?”
“Why shouldn’t I be? I’m your wife, aren’t I? You taught me yourself… and now you’re rebuking me for doing it… I’m just doing my job.”
“Listen, Liza!” said Pyotr Ivanych after a short pause. “Are you trying to go against your true nature, suppress your true instincts?… That’s wrong! I’ve never tried to coerce you; you don’t expect me to believe that this stuff” – he said, pointing to the ledger – “interests you. Why do you impose these constraints on yourself? I allow you total freedom…”
“My God! What do I need freedom for?” said Lizaveta Alexandrovna. “What would I do with it? You have always been so good at arranging everything for both of us that I’ve got out of the habit of thinking for myself – so just keep on doing what you’ve always done, and I won’t have any need of freedom.”
They both lapsed into silence.
“It’s been a long time,” began Pyotr Ivanych, “since I’ve heard you ask for anything, express any wish, or even a whim.”
“I don’t need anything,” she said.
“But don’t you have any special… private wishes?” he asked earnestly, looking straight at her.
She was hesitating whether to answer or not.
Pyotr Ivanych noticed her hesitation.
“Tell me, for God’s sake, tell me! Your wishes will be mine, they will be the law, and I will respect it.”
“Very well,” she replied, “if you’re willing to do that for me, then abolish our Fridays… I can’t stand those dinners…”
Pyotr Ivanych stopped to think.
“As it is, you live in seclusion,” he resumed, “and when our friends stop visiting on Fridays, you’ll be in total isolation. But all right, if that’s what you want, that’s what I’ll do. But what will you do then?”
“Just hand over to me your accounts, your books, your affairs, and I’ll deal with it all,” she said, and reached under the table to retrieve the ledger.
Pyotr Ivanych took this to be a poorly disguised pretence.
“Liza!” he said reproachfully.
The ledger remained under the table.
“What I was thinking was: why don’t you revive some old acquaintanceships which we’ve completely given up? I’d like to give a ball – that would be a way of doing it. You would enjoy yourself, you could start going out yourself…”
“Oh, no! Not that!” Lizaveta Alexandrovna exclaimed in a fright. “For God’s sake, don’t do that! A ball… How could you think of such a thing!”
“But what are you so afraid of? You’re still young enough to enjoy a ball; you can still dance…”
“No, Pyotr Ivanych, please don’t start all that!” she said spiritedly. “Having to worry about what to wear, what accessories, entertaining a crowd of people, going out – God help us!”
“So you mean you want to spend the rest of your life going around in this smock?”
“Yes, if you don’t mind, I would never take it off. What’s the point of getting all dressed up? And think of the expense: all that fuss and bother, all for nothing.”
“You know what?” Pyotr Ivanych suddenly put in. “I understand that this winter Rubini* is going to perform here – a whole season of Italian opera; I’ve reserved a box for us – what do you think?”
She said nothing.
“Liza!”
“There’s no point…” she said timidly. “I’m afraid that too would be too much for me… I get tired…”
Pyotr Ivanych bent his head, went over to the fireplace and, leaning against the mantelpiece, looked at her with an expression of – how shall I say? – sadness – no, not sadness, rather alarm, concern and fear.
“Where, Liza, does it come from, this…” he began, but could not go on – he couldn’t bring himself to utter the word “indifference”.
He continued to look at her for a long time without speaking.
In her lifeless, dim eyes, on her face, totally devoid of the animation of thought and feelings, in her apathetic pose and sluggish movements, he glimpsed the reason for this indifference – the word he had been afraid to utter. He had already guessed the answer when the doctor had hinted to him about his apprehensions. He had even then started to see things clearly and begun to suspect that in systematically barring his wife from any irregularities in her behaviour which he thought might threaten their marriage, he was at the same time denying her anything in his own behaviour and attitudes which might make up for the loss of those, perhaps illicit, satisfactions which might be available to her outside her marriage, and that her home life was nothing less than a fortress which by his methods had been made impregnable to temptation from the outside, while inside, it was patrolled and barricaded against all legitimate expressions of feeling…
He was quite unaware that despite himself, his by-the-book approach, and lack of warmth in his dealings with her, had come to amount to a kind of cold tyranny – and a tyranny over whom? Why, the heart of a woman! The price he paid for this tyranny was wealth, luxury and all the superficial and what he imagined to be the appropriate components of happiness – a terrible mistake, and all the more disastrous because he did this not out of ignorance, not out of a merely rudimentary understanding of the human heart – he did understand it – but rather because of negligence and his self-centredness! He forgot that she had no job or career, didn’t play cards, had no factory, and that the best food and wine meant very little to a woman – yet that was the kind of life which he had imposed upon her.
Pyotr Ivanych was well meaning, and he would have given anything to make amends – if not out of love for his wife, at least because it was the right and fair thing to do. But how to make amends? He had spent more than one sleepless night since the doctor had told him of his apprehensions regarding his wife’s health, trying to find ways and means of reconciling her heart with her present situation and repelling those forces which were destroying her. And that was precisely what he was thinking about as he stood by the fire. He could not help wondering whether some deadly disease might already have taken root in her as a result of the drab and empty life she had been living…
His brow broke into a cold sweat. He was busily trying to devise ways and means, but felt the key must lie more in the heart than the head. But where was he to find that key? Something was telling him that if only he could bring himself to fall at her feet, fold her lovingly in his arms and tell her with passion in his voice that he lived only for her, and that she was the sole purpose of all his work, his busyness, his career, his accumulation of wealth, and that his mechanical way of treating her was driven only by the fierce, unremitting and zealous desire to secure his place in her heart… He understood that the effect of such words would galvanize her corpse back to life, back to flourishing health and to happiness, and that there would no longer be any need to go and take the waters.
But to speak and to prove are two quite different things. In order to prove, there must be a passion to do so, but when he looked into his soul, Pyotr Ivanych could find no trace of passion. He felt only that his wife was indispensable to him – which was true – but un
like the other things in life which were indispensable to him, she was only indispensable out of habit. It was possible that he would not be averse to dissembling, and playing the role of lover, for all that it was ridiculous for a man of fifty suddenly to start speaking the language of passion; but to pretend to a woman that you are passionately in love with her when you aren’t? Would he be able to muster enough heroism and ingenuity to carry the burden of this act through to the point at which the cravings of her heart would be satisfied?
But what if the wound inflicted on her pride would prove a death blow to her when she noticed that something which several years before would have been a magic potion was being served up to her now as medicine? No, in his usual meticulous fashion, he had carefully weighed and pondered this belated step, and had decided against it. There was something that he had thought of doing along the same lines, but in a different way, since it had now become possible and necessary. For three months now, he had been toying with a thought which at first had seemed absurd, but right now – it was different! He had been keeping the idea for an emergency. Well, the emergency was at hand, and he decided to carry out his plan.
The Same Old Story Page 40
