‘It’s getting chilly’, Olga said, shivering.
Ryabovsky wrapped his cloak around her. ‘I feel I’m in your power’, he said sadly. ‘I’m your slave. Oh, why are you so bewitching tonight?’
He looked at her and he could not take his eyes off her – eyes that were so frightening she was scared to look at him.
‘I love you madly…’ he whispered, breathing on her cheek. ‘Just say the word and I’ll put an end to my life. I’ll give up art…’ he muttered with deep emotion. ‘Love me, love me…’
‘Don’t say such things’, Olga said and closed her eyes. ‘It frightens me. What about Dymov?’
‘Dymov? Why bring Dymov up? What do I care about Dymov? There’s the Volga, the moon, beauty, my love for you, my ecstasy – but there’s no Dymov… Oh, I know nothing. I care nothing for the past, grant me one instant, one fleeting moment…’
Olga’s heart was pounding. She tried to think of her husband, but her entire past, with the wedding, Dymov and her soirées, seemed so small, trivial, dull, unnecessary, and so very, very far away. And in fact what did Dymov matter? Why Dymov? What did she care about Dymov? Did he really exist or was he only a dream?
‘That simple, ordinary man has already had his fair share of happiness’, she thought, covering her face with her hands. ‘Let them condemn me there, let them curse me – to spite the lot of them I’ll follow the path of perdition, become a fallen woman… One must experience everything in life. Heavens, how terrifying – and how marvellous!’
‘Well, what? What do you say?’ muttered the artist, embracing her and greedily kissing her hands with which she feebly tried to push him away. ‘Do you love me? Yes? Yes? Oh, what a night! A magical night!’
‘Yes, what a night!’ she whispered, looking into his eyes that were glistening with tears. Then she quickly looked round, embraced him and kissed him firmly on the mouth.
‘We’re approaching Kineshma!’1 someone called out on the other side of the deck.
There was a sound of heavy footsteps – it was the bar waiter going past.
‘Listen’, Olga called to him, laughing and crying with happiness. ‘Please bring us some wine.’
Pale with emotion, the artist sat on a bench and looked at Olga with adoring, grateful eyes. As he closed them he said with a languid smile:
‘I’m tired.’
And he leaned his head towards the rail.
V
September the second was warm and calm, but overcast. A light early morning mist was drifting over the Volga and after nine o’clock it began to drizzle. There was no hope of it clearing up. Over breakfast Ryabovsky told Olga that painting was the most thankless and boring art, that he was not an artist and that only fools thought that he had talent. Then, all of a sudden, for no apparent reason, he seized a knife and made scratches on his best sketch. After breakfast he sat gloomily at the window, gazing at the Volga. But the Volga no longer gleamed; it was dull and lustreless, with a cold look. Everything reminded them that dreary, miserable autumn was approaching. Nature seemed to have taken away everything that was showy and flamboyant from the Volga – those luxuriant green carpets on her banks, those diamond-like sunbeams, that crystal clear blue distance – and packed it away in boxes until spring; and the crows that were flying over the river were teasing it for being so bare. As Ryabovsky listened to their cawing he brooded over the fact that he was washed up, his talent had gone, that everything in this world was conditional, relative and stupid, and that he should never have got involved with that woman. In a word, he wasn’t himself at all and he felt very depressed.
Olga sat on the bed behind a screen, running her fingers through her beautiful flaxen hair, picturing herself in her drawing-room, then in her bedroom, then in her husband’s study. Her imagination transported her to the theatre, to the dressmaker, then to her celebrity friends. What would they all be doing now? Did they remember her? The season had already begun and it was time to think of soirées. What about Dymov? Dear Dymov! How gently – as plaintively as a child – he had implored her in his letters to hurry home! Every month he sent her seventy roubles and when she wrote that she owed the other artists one hundred roubles, he sent her that too. Such a kind, generous man! Olga was tired from the journey, bored and longing to get away as fast as she could from those peasants, that damp river smell, and to rid herself of that sensation of physical impurity she had felt all the time she had lived in those peasant huts and wandered from village to village. If Ryabovsky had not promised the artists that he would stay with them until 20 September she could have left that very same day. How lovely that would have been!
‘God, when will the sun ever come out?’ Ryabovsky groaned. ‘How can I do a sunlit landscape without any sun?’
‘But there’s that sketch of yours with a cloudy sky’, Olga said, coming out from behind the screen. ‘Remember? There’s a wood in the right foreground and a herd of cows and some geese on the left. You could finish that one now.’
‘Eh?’ said Ryabovsky, frowning. ‘Finish it!? Do you think I’m so stupid that I don’t know what has to be done?’
‘How you’ve changed towards me!’ sighed Olga.
‘And a jolly good thing too!’
Olga’s face trembled; she went over to the stove and burst into tears.
‘My God! Tears! That’s all I need! Stop it! I’ve a thousand reasons for crying but you won’t catch me at it.’
‘A thousand reasons!’ sobbed Olga. ‘And the main one is that you’re tired of me. Oh yes!’ she said and began sobbing. ‘The truth is, you’re ashamed of our affair. You keep trying to hide it from the others even though it’s impossible to hide – they’ve known about it for ages!’
‘Olga, I ask only one thing of you’, the artist begged and laid his hand on his heart. ‘One thing! Don’t torment me! That’s all I want from you!’
‘But swear you still love me!’
‘This is sheer hell!’ Ryabovsky hissed between his teeth and leapt up. ‘I’ll end up by throwing myself into the Volga or going out of my mind! Leave me alone!’
‘All right then, kill me!’ cried Olga. ‘Go on, kill me!’
Once again she burst out sobbing and went behind the screen. The rain rustled on the thatched roof of the hut. Ryabovsky clutched his head and paced up and down. Then, with a determined look, as if he wanted to prove something to someone, he put on his cap, threw his rifle over his shoulder and went out.
After he had gone Olga lay for a long time on the bed and wept. First she thought it would be a good idea to poison herself, so that Ryabovsky would return to find her dead. But then her thoughts carried her off to her drawing-room, into her husband’s study and she pictured herself sitting quite still at Dymov’s side, enjoying the physical relaxation and cleanliness, and then in the theatre one evening, listening to Masini.2 And a yearning for civilization, for the bustle of the city, for famous people, tugged at her heart-strings. A peasant woman entered the hut, and slowly started lighting the stove so that she could prepare dinner. There was a smell of burning and the air filled with blue smoke. The artists returned in their muddy topboots, their faces wet with rain. They inspected each other’s sketches and consoled themselves with the thought that even in bad weather the Volga had a charm of its own. The cheap clock on the wall ticked away monotonously. Chilled flies crowded together and buzzed in the front corner by the icons – and the cockroaches could be heard scurrying about in the thick files underneath the benches.
Ryabovsky returned when the sun was setting. He threw his cap onto the table. With a pale, exhausted look, still wearing his muddy boots, he sank onto a bench and closed his eyes.
‘I’m tired…’ he said, twitching his eyebrows and trying to raise his eyelids.
In an effort to be nice to him and to show that she wasn’t angry, Olga went over, kissed him and without saying a word ran her comb through his hair: she wanted to give it a really good tidy up.
‘What’s this?’ he said,
shuddering, as if something cold had touched him. He opened his eyes. ‘What’s this? Leave me in peace, I beg you.’
He pushed her aside and walked away – and his face seemed to show revulsion and irritation, she thought. Just then the peasant woman came in, carefully carrying a bowl of cabbage soup in both hands. Olga could see that the woman had dipped both thumbs in the soup. And that dirty old woman with her tightly belted stomach, the cabbage soup that Ryabovsky greedily started devouring, the hut and that whole life which she had loved so much at first for its simplicity and Bohemian chaos now struck her as downright appalling. Suddenly she felt insulted.
‘We must separate for a while’, she said coldly, ‘or we’ll end up having a serious quarrel from the sheer boredom of it. I’m sick and tired of all this. I’m leaving today.’
‘And how will you go? Ride on a broomstick?’
‘Today’s Thursday, there’s a steamboat at half past nine.’
‘Oh yes, so there is… well, take it then’, Ryabovsky said gently, wiping his mouth on a towel instead of a serviette. ‘It’s boring and there’s nothing for you to do here. It would be terribly selfish of me if I tried to stop you. Go then, we’ll meet after the twentieth.’
Olga gaily packed and her cheeks even glowed with pleasure. Could it be true, she wondered, that soon she would be painting in a drawing-room, sleeping in a bedroom and dining with a cloth on the table? She felt as if a weight had been lifted from her. And no longer did she feel angry with the artist.
‘I’m leaving you my paints and brushes, my dear Ryabovsky’, she said. ‘You can bring anything I’ve left behind… But mind you don’t become lazy when I’ve gone, don’t mope, and get on with your work. You’re a very fine person, my dear old Ryabovsky.’
At nine o’clock Ryabovsky kissed her goodbye, so that he would not have to kiss her on the steamboat in front of the others (so she thought), and he saw her to the landing-stage. The steamboat soon arrived and carried her away.
Two and a half days later she arrived home. Without taking off her hat or raincoat and breathless with excitement she went into the drawing-room and from there into the dining-room. Dymov was sitting at the table without any jacket, his waistcoat unbuttoned, sharpening a knife on a fork. There was a grouse on the plate in front of him. When Olga entered she felt quite convinced that everything must be concealed from her husband and that she had the skill and strength to do this. But now, when she saw his broad, gentle, happy smile and his eyes bright with joy, she felt that to deceive that man would be as vile, detestable and just as inconceivable and beyond her as slandering, stealing or murdering. So in a flash she decided to tell all. After letting him kiss and embrace her she knelt before him and covered her face.
‘What is it? What’s wrong, Mother?’ he asked tenderly. ‘Did you miss me?’
She raised her face that was red with shame and gave him a guilty, imploring look. But fear and guilt prevented her from speaking the truth.
‘It’s nothing’, she said. ‘I’m just…’
‘Let’s sit down’, he said, lifting her to her feet and sitting her at the table. ‘That’s it… Now, have some grouse. You must be starving, you poor thing.’
Eagerly she inhaled the air of home and ate some grouse, while he watched with loving tenderness and laughed for joy.
VI
By the middle of winter it was apparent that Dymov had begun to guess that he was being deceived. Just as if his own conscience was not clear, he could no longer look his wife in the eye, no longer smiled happily when they met, and in order to avoid being alone with her so much would often invite his colleague Korostelev home for a meal. This colleague was a short, close-cropped little man with a wrinkled face who, whenever he spoke to Olga, would keep buttoning and unbuttoning his jacket in embarrassment and then start tweaking the left side of his moustache with his right hand. At dinner both doctors would discuss elevation of the diaphragm being occasionally accompanied by irregular heartbeat, or how common neuritis was these days, or how Dymov had discovered cancer of the pancreas when performing a postmortem the day before on a patient diagnosed to have died of pernicious anaemia. Both seemed to be talking shop only so that Olga could remain silent – in other words, not tell any lies. After dinner Korostelev would sit at the piano.
‘Ah well, my dear chap!’ Dymov would sigh. ‘Play us something sad!’
With his shoulders raised and his fingers spread wide apart, Korostelev would play a few chords and start to sing:
Show me that abode
Where the Russian peasant does not groan.3
Dymov would give another sigh, prop his head on his fist and ponder.
Of late Olga had been behaving with the greatest indiscretion. Every morning she would wake up in the foulest of moods, thinking that she no longer loved Ryabovsky and that it was all over, thank God. But by the time she had drunk her coffee she was inclined to believe that Ryabovsky had alienated her husband and that now she was left without husband or Ryabovsky. Then she would recall her friends saying that Ryabovsky was preparing something quite sensational for an exhibition, a combination of landscape and genre à la Polenov,4 which sent every visitor to his studio into raptures. Surely it was thanks to her influence that he had produced such a painting? And in general it was thanks to her that he had improved so dramatically. Her influence was so beneficial, so vital, that if she were to desert him he would probably go right downhill. She also remembered that on his last visit he had worn a kind of grey patterned silk coat and a new tie. ‘Do I look handsome!’ he had languidly asked. And in fact (or so she thought) he was very handsome, so elegant with his long curls and blue eyes. And he had been very nice to her.
After much reminiscing and reflection, Olga would get dressed and – in a great tizzy – take a cab to Ryabovsky’s studio. She would find him in a cheerful mood, in ecstasies over his painting, which was truly splendid. He would jump about, play the fool and reply to all serious questions by joking. Olga was jealous of Ryabovsky’s picture: she hated it, but she would stand before it in silence for five minutes – for politeness’ sake – and then sigh like someone viewing a sacred object.
‘No, you’ve never done anything like it before’, she would softly say. ‘You know, it’s really awe-inspiring!’
Then she would start pleading with him to love her, not to desert her, to take pity on her, poor miserable wretch that she was. She would weep and kiss his hands and insist that he vowed his love for her, and she tried to prove to him that without her good influence he would lose his way and finally meet with disaster. And after dampening his spirits and feeling that she had been humiliated, she would take a cab to her dressmaker’s or an actress friend to try to wangle a free theatre ticket.
Should she not find Ryabovsky in his studio she would leave a letter vowing to poison herself without fail if he didn’t come and see her that very same day. He would panic, go and see her and stay for dinner. Uninhibited by her husband’s presence, he would be impertinent to her – and she would reply in kind. Both found that they were cramping each other’s style, that they were despots and deadly enemies. And they would become furious with one another – and in their fury they failed to notice how badly they were behaving and that even the close-cropped Korostelev knew everything that was going on. After the meal Ryabovsky would make a hasty farewell and leave.
‘Where are you going?’ Olga would ask him in the hall with a venomous look.
Frowning and screwing up his eyes, he would mention some woman they both knew – clearly he was gloating over her jealousy and all he wanted was to annoy her. She would go to her bedroom and lie down on the bed, biting the pillow and sobbing out loud from jealousy, vexation, humiliation and shame. Dymov would leave Korostelev in the drawing-room, go into the bedroom and softly say, embarrassed and dismayed:
‘Don’t cry so loud, Mother. What’s the point? You must say nothing about it… You mustn’t let people see… What’s done cannot be undone – you know that.’
Not knowing how to deaden that nagging feeling of jealousy that even made her head ache and convinced that things could still be put right, she would wash, powder her tear-stained face and fly off to a woman friend. If she didn’t find Ryabovsky there, she would go to another, then to a third. At first she was ashamed of running about like this, but then it became a habit and in a single evening she did the rounds of all the women she knew in her search for Ryabovsky, and all of them were well aware of this.
Once she told Ryabovsky about her husband:
‘That man is crushing me with his magnanimity!’
So delighted was she with this phrase that whenever she met artists who knew of her affair with Ryabovsky she would say of her husband with a sweeping gesture:
‘That man is crushing me with his magnanimity!’
Her routine was just the same as the previous year. On Wednesdays there were the soirées. The actor recited, the artists sketched, the cellist played, the opera singer sang and at half past eleven the dining-room door never failed to open and Dymov would say with a smile:
‘Supper is served, gentlemen!’
And as before, Olga sought out great men, discovered them, found they were not up to scratch and continued searching. And as before she would come home late every night. But unlike the previous year Dymov would not be asleep, but would be sitting in his study working. He would go to bed at three and get up at eight.
Ward No. 6 and Other Stories Page 5
