An Ordinary Story

by Ivan Goncharov

  “It’s already late; some other time.”

  “So you refuse me even this?”

  “You more than anyone.”

  “Why?”

  “It would take a long while to explain. Good night.”

  “Half an hour, Alexander, do you hear, no more. If you refuse, it means you never had even a hair’s breadth of friendship for me.”

  She asked with such feeling and so persuasively that Alexander hadn’t the heart to refuse and he let his head droop as he followed her. Pyotr Ivanych was in his study.

  “Have I really earned only disdain from you, Alexander?” asked Lizaveta Alexandrovna, seating him near the fireplace.

  “You’re mistaken: it isn’t neglect,” he answered.

  “Then what does it mean? What should we call it? How many times have I written to you, invited you to come here; you haven’t come and finally stopped answering my notes.”

  “It isn’t disdain…”

  “What is it then?”

  “Well,” said Alexander and sighed. “Good night, dear Aunt.”

  “Wait! What have I done to you? What is the matter with you, Alexander? Why are you like this? Why are you indifferent to everything? Why don’t you go anywhere? Why do you live in company not of your kind?”

  “That’s the way it is, dear Aunt. I like this way of life. I like living calmly. This is my kind of life…”

  “Your kind? Do you find food for mind and heart in such a life, with such people?”

  Alexander nodded his assent.

  “You’re pretending, Alexander; you’ve been very hurt by something and won’t talk about it. Before, you used to know whom you could tell about your grief. You knew you’d always find comfort or at least sympathy. But now do you really have no one?”

  “No one!”

  “You believe no one?”

  “No one.”

  “Do you really not remember sometimes your dear mama, her love for you… her caresses?.. Hasn’t it really occurred to you that perhaps someone here too loves you, if not as she does, still at least like a sister, or better still, like a friend?”

  “Goodbye, dear Aunt,” he said.

  “Goodbye, Alexander: I shan’t keep you longer,” his aunt answered. Tears came to her eyes.

  Alexander was about to take his hat, but then he laid it down and looked at Lizaveta Alexandrovna.

  “No, I can’t run away from you; I haven’t the strength!” he said. “What are you doing to me!”

  “Be the old Alexander again, even for a minute. Tell me, entrust it all to me.”

  “Indeed, I can’t be silent with you; I’ll tell you everything that’s in my heart,” he said. “You ask why I’ve been hiding from people, why I’m indifferent to everything, why I haven’t been seeing even you… Why? You know that I’ve been disgusted with life for a long time and I’ve chosen a way of living in which one can feel less. I don’t want anything, I don’t seek anything except calm, the sleep of the soul. I’ve come to know all the emptiness, the void of life, and deeply scorn it. He who has lived and thought can never look on mankind without disdain. 16 Activity, tasks, worries, recreation–I became sick and tired of it all, I don’t want to achieve and strive for anything. I have no goal because when you try for something, you achieve it–only to realize it’s an illusion. Joys are past for me; I’ve cooled toward them. In the educated world, among people, I feel the disadvantages of life more strongly, but at home, alone, far from the crowd I’ve become numb; no matter what may happen in this somnolence I don’t notice either other people or myself. I do nothing and I don’t see my deeds or those of others, and I’m at peace… I don’t care. There can be no happiness, but unhappiness cannot get to me…”

  “That’s awful! Alexander, at your time of life,” said his aunt, “such indifference to everything…”

  “What are you surprised about, dear Aunt? Separate yourself for a minute from the narrow confines in which you are enclosed. Look at life, at the world. What is it?… What was great yesterday, means nothing today. What you wanted yesterday, you don’t want today. Your friend of yesterday is your enemy today. Is it worth bothering about something, loving, becoming attached, quarreling, making up–in a word, living? Isn’t it better to sleep in both mind and heart? I sleep; that’s the reason I don’t go anywhere, and especially not to see you. I was about to fall completely to sleep, but you’re waking up my mind and heart and pushing them back into the abyss again. If you want to see me cheerful, healthy, perhaps even alive, even, if you will, in Uncle’s sense happy–leave me where I am now. Let these emotions calm down, let my dreams fade, my mind go numb, let my heart turn to stone, my eyes lose the habit of tears, my lips of smiles–and then in a year, maybe two, I’ll come to see you wholly ready for any test; then you’ll not awaken me, however you try, but now…” He made a desperate gesture.

  “Look, Alexander,” quickly interrupted his aunt, “in one minute you’ve changed. You have tears in your eyes. You’re still quite the same; don’t pretend, don’t hold back your feelings, give them free rein…”

  “What for? I won’t be the better for it! I’ll only torture myself the more. This evening has destroyed me in my own eyes. I’ve seen clearly that I haven’t the right to blame anyone for my melancholy. I myself have ruined my life. I dreamed of glory, Heaven knows why, and neglected my business, I’ve ruined my modest vocation and can’t make up for the past–it’s too late! I fled the crowd, disdained it–but this German with his deep, powerful soul and poetic nature does not flee from the crowd; he’s proud of their applause. He understands that he’s a barely noticeable link in the infinite chain of humanity. He too knows everything I know; sufferings are familiar to him. People listened as he told in sounds of his whole life, both its joys and sorrows and happiness, and also the soul’s grief–he understands it. How small I suddenly became today, nothing in my own eyes with my sadness, sufferings! He awakened in me the bitter awareness that I am proud–and powerless… Alas, why did you invite me? Goodbye, let me go…”

  “What am I to blame for, Alexander? You’re not saying I could awaken bitterness in you–I?…”

  “That’s just the trouble! Your angelic, kind face, dear Aunt, gentle speeches, friendly hand squeeze–all that disturbs and touches me. I want to cry, to live again, suffer… but what for?”

  “What do you mean, what for? Stay with us always; and if you think me even a little bit worthy of your friendship, you will then find comfort in another person. I’m not the only such… others will value you.”

  “Yes! You think that will comfort me? You think I shall trust that momentary compassion? You are, true, a woman in the noblest sense of the word. You were made for the joy, the happiness of a man, but can one count on that happiness? Can one guarantee that it is firm, that today or tomorrow fate won’t turn this happy life upside down–that’s the question! Can one believe anything and anybody, even oneself? Isn’t it better to live without any hopes and feelings, not expect anything, not seek any joys and therefore not mourn any losses?”

  “You can’t escape fate anywhere, Alexander. Even where you are now, it will always pursue you…”

  “Yes, true. Only there fate has nothing to play with; instead, I play with it. Look how a fish will get away from the fisherman when he’s already stretched out his hand for it, how it will start raining just when you are setting out for town, or how the weather will be fine but you feel like… so it’s really ridiculous…”

  Lizaveta Alexandrovna had no more arguments. “You will get married… you’ll love…” she said indecisively.

  “I get married! Just one more thing! Do you really think I’d entrust my happiness to a woman, even if I fell in love with her, which is also impossible? Or do you really think I’d undertake to make a woman happy? No, I know we’d deceive one another and both deceive ourselves. Uncle Pyotr Ivanych and experience have taught me…”

  “Pyotr Ivanych! Yes, he’s much to blame!” said Lizaveta Alexand
rovna with a sigh, “but you had the right not to listen to him… and you’d be happy in marriage…”

  “Yes, in the country, of course; but now… No, dear Aunt, marriage is not for me. By now I can’t pretend when I fall out of love and stop being happy. I can’t help but see if my wife pretends either; we’d both be slyly pretending, as… for example, Uncle and you do…”

  “We?” asked Lizaveta Alexandrovna with astonishment and fear.

  “Yes, you! Tell me now: Are you happy, as you once dreamed you’d be?”

  “Not as I dreamed… but happy in a different way than I dreamed, more reasonably, perhaps more so–isn’t it all unimportant?…” answered Lizaveta Alexandrovna, embarrassed. “And you too…”

  “More reasonably! Oh, dear Aunt, you should not talk thus; that’s Uncle’s word! I know this happiness according to his method; it’s more reasonable. Good, but is it more so? You see, to him everything’s happiness; there is no unhappiness. Let him have it his way! No! My life is over; I’ve grown weary, tired of living…”

  Both fell silent. Alexander looked at his hat; his aunt considered what else could prevent his leaving.

  “But your talent!” she said suddenly in a lively way.

  “Alas! dear Aunt! You want to laugh at me! You’ve forgotten the Russian proverb: Don’t beat a man when he’s down. I don’t have any talent, decidedly not. I have feeling, I had a lively imagination. I took dreams for creativity and created. Not long ago I found some of my old sins, read them–and I had to laugh myself. Uncle’s right in having made me burn everything there was. Oh, if I could bring back the past! I wouldn’t have used it so.”

  “Don’t despair altogether!” she said. “Each of us has his heavy cross to bear…”

  “Who’s this must bear a cross?” asked Pyotr Ivanych, entering the room. “Greetings, Alexander! Your cross, is it?”

  Pyotr Ivanych was bent over and hardly moved his legs when he walked.

  “Only it isn’t the cross you think,” said Lizaveta Alexandrovna. “I’m speaking of the heavy cross Alexander bears…”

  “What else is he bearing now?” asked Pyotr Ivanych, letting himself down into the armchair with greatest care. “Ouch! what pain! What a punishment!”

  Lizaveta Alexandrovna helped him sit down, put a pillow under his back and moved a stool under his feet.

  “What is the matter with you, Uncle?” asked Alexander.

  “You see, I’m carrying a heavy cross! Oh, the small of my back. This is a real cross: this is the reward for long service. Oh, Heavens!”

  “It’s your own doing that you sit so much; you know this climate,” said Lizaveta Alexandrovna. “The doctor told you to walk more, but you won’t. In the morning he writes, and in the evening plays cards.”

  “What, should I start to walk the streets yawning with boredom and wasting time besides?”

  “So, you’re punished.”

  “You won’t escape it here, if you choose to work in business. Who doesn’t have lumbago? It’s almost a kind of business man’s distinguished service cross. Oh! you can’t straighten up your back. Well, what are you busy with Alexander?”

  “Everything as before.”

  “Ah! So that way your back won’t start hurting. That’s surprising, really!”

  “Why are you surprised; aren’t you yourself partly to blame that he’s become what he is…” said Lizaveta Alexandrovna.

  “I? Now I like that! I taught him to do nothing!”

  “Quite right, Uncle, you have no cause for surprise,” said Alexander. “You very much helped circumstances to make of me what I am now, but I don’t blame you. I am myself to blame that I didn’t know how–or, better, wasn’t able to use your lessons as I should have because I wasn’t prepared for them. Perhaps you’re partly to blame because you at once understood my nature and nevertheless wanted to transform it. As an experienced person, you should have known that’s impossible… You awakened in me a contest between two different views of life and could not reconcile them. What was the result? Everything in me turned to doubt, a kind of chaos, Uncle!”

  “Ouch, my back!” groaned Pyotr Ivanych. “Chaos! So you see, out of chaos I tried to make something.”

  “Yes! But what did you make? You confronted me with life in its ugliest nakedness and at an age when I should have been seeing it only from the bright side.”

  “That is, I tried to show you life as it is so that you didn’t get false ideas in your head. I remember what a brave fellow you were on your arrival from the country. You had to be forewarned that you couldn’t be like that here. I forewarned you perhaps against many mistakes and stupidities! If it weren’t for me, you might have made once again as many as you did!”

  “Perhaps. Only you’ve left one thing out of consideration, Uncle– happiness. You’ve forgotten that a man is happy in his delusions, dreams and hopes; reality doesn’t make one happy…”

  “What crazy ideas you carry about! You brought that opinion straight from the Asian border. In Europe we long ago stopped believing that. Dreams, games, illusion–all that’s good for women and children, but a man must know his business as it is. Do you think that’s worse than deceiving yourself?”

  “Yes, Uncle. Whatever you say, happiness is woven of illusions, hopes, trust in people, confidence in oneself, then of love and friendship… But you assured me that love is nonsense, an empty feeling, that it’s easy and even better to go through life without it, that to love passionately–is not a great achievement, that we don’t outshine the animals in that…”

  “Just remember how you wanted to love, you composed bad verses, talked in a wild language, and so bored to death your… was it Grunya, whatever her name! Is that the way to gain a woman’s love?”

  “How then?” Lizaveta Alexandrovna dryly asked her husband.

  “Ouch, how my back pains stab!” groaned Pyotr Ivanych.

  “Then you insisted,” Alexander continued, “there is no deep, harmonious love, but only habit…”

  Lizaveta Alexandrovna, silent and in deep thought, looked at her husband.

  “That is, I, do you see, I talked to you so as to, in order that you… oh, oh, my back!”

  “And you told that,” Alexander continued, “to a twenty-year-old boy for whom love was everything, whose activity, goal–everything turned on that feeling by which he could be saved or lost.”

  “You talk as if you were born two hundred years ago!” muttered Pyotr Ivanych. “You should have lived under Tsar Gorokh.” 17

  “You explained to me,” said Alexander, “your theory of love, deceptions, infidelities, coolnesses… what for? So that I knew everything before I began to love. So that when I loved, I indeed analyzed my love, as a schoolboy studies the anatomy of the body under his teacher’s guidance and, instead of the beauty of forms, sees only muscles, nerves…”

  “Yet, I remember, it didn’t stop you from going crazy over that… what’s her name–Dasha?”

  “Yes, but you didn’t let me be deceived. I would have found Nadenka’s betrayal an unfortunate chance and waited till I didn’t need love. But you immediately were on hand with your theory and showed me that was the universal rule. So at twenty-five I lost my faith in happiness and life, and grew old in my soul. You rejected friendship, called it habit, named yourself my best friend, and that probably as a joke, doubtless because you succeeded in proving there is no friendship.”

  Pyotr Ivanych listened and with one hand massaged his back. He made objections carelessly like a man who, it seemed, could with a single word annihilate all the accusations brought against him.

  “And you had a good understanding of friendship,” he said. “You wanted your friend to playact the same comedy as, they say, those two fools in antiquity… what were their names? One of them remained behind as a hostage while his friend went off to keep an appointment… Now, if everyone acted like that, the whole world would be an insane asylum!”

  “I loved people,” Alexander continued, “a
nd believed in their worth, I considered them brothers, and would have reached out to them in warm embrace…”

  “Yes, just what we needed! I do remember your embraces,” interrupted Pyotr Ivanych, “you absolutely pursued me with them then.”

  “And you showed me what they’re worth. Instead of guiding my heart in its attachments, you taught me not to feel, but to analyze and observe people and be wary of them. I observed them–and lost my love for them!”

  “Who could tell you’d take it like that! You’re so quick, you see, I thought this would only make you more lenient toward them. I know them but haven’t come to hate them…”

  “What, you love people?” asked Lizaveta Alexandrovna.

  “I’ve grown accustomed… to them.”

  “Grown accustomed!” she repeated in a monotone.

  “He, too, would have grown accustomed,” said Pyotr Ivanych, “only he was already badly spoiled earlier in the country by his auntie and the yellow flowers; that’s why he’s been so slow growing up.”

  “I believed then in myself,” Alexander began again. “You showed me I was worse than others–I took to hating even myself.”

  “If you looked at the matter more coolheadedly, you’d see that you’re neither worse nor better–which is what I wanted of you. Then you’d not hate either others or yourself; you’d only bear people’s stupidities with greater equanimity and you’d pay more attention to your own. I know my own value, I see that I have faults, but I do admit I love myself a lot.”

  “Ah! so you love in this instance and haven’t grown accustomed!” coldly remarked Lizaveta Alexandrovna.

  “Ouch, my back!” groaned Pyotr Ivanych.

  “Finally, at one blow without forewarning or pity you destroyed my best dream: I thought I had a spark of poetic talent. You cruelly proved to me that I was not made to be a priest of literature. You painfully tore that splinter out of my heart and offered me work that I found repulsive. Without you I would have written…”

  “And you’d be known to the public as an untalented writer,” interrupted Pyotr Ivanych.

  “What do I care about the public? I would have bothered about myself. I would have attributed my failures to meanness, ill-will and would gradually have grown used to the notion that one doesn’t have to write and would have tried something else by myself. Why are you surprised that I became depressed after finding out everything?”