BY MAXIM GORKI
Translated by Lizzie B. Gorin.
An acquaintance of mine once told me the following story:
“While still a student at Moscow I happened to be living alongside one of those—well, she was a Polish woman, Teresa by name. A tall, powerfully built brunette with heavy, bushy eyebrows, and a large coarse, vulgar face, as if carved out with an ax—the animal gleam of her eyes, the deep bass voice, the gait and manners of a cabman, and her immense strength like that of a market-woman, inspired me with an inexpressible horror. I lived in the garret of the house, and her room was opposite mine. I never opened my door when I knew that she was in. But this, of course, happened very rarely. Sometimes I chanced to meet her on the landing, staircase, or in the yard, and she would look at me with a smile which seemed to me cynical and rapacious. Occasionally I saw her in her cups, with bleary eyes, her hair and clothes in disorder and with a particularly loathsome smile. On such occasions she would meet my eye with an impudent stare and say:
“‘How are you, Pan Student?’[10]
“And her stupid laugh would increase my dislike for her still more. I would have liked nothing better than to change my quarters in order to get rid of her proximity, but my room was so nice, and the view from my window was so fine, the street below so quiet and peaceful, that I concluded to endure it.
“One morning after I had dressed and was sprawling on the cot, trying to invent some sort of an excuse for not attending my classes, the door of my room suddenly opened, and the disgusting bass voice of the Polish woman sounded from the threshold:
“‘Good morning, Pan Student!’
“‘What is it you wish?’ I asked her. I saw she looked confused and had in her face a kind of pleading expression, something unusual with her.
“‘You see, Pan Student, I came to beg you to do me a great favor. Don’t refuse me, please!’
“Lying there on my cot I thought that it was just some pretext or other to make my further acquaintance. Take care, my boy!
“‘You see, I have to send a letter to my native country,’ she continued in a supplicating, low, tremulous voice.
“‘Well,’ I thought, ‘the devil take you. If you wish I will write it for you.’ And springing to my feet I sat down to the table, took some paper and said: ‘Well, come nearer; sit down and dictate.’
“She came over; sat down cautiously on the edge of the chair and looked at me in rather a guilty way.
“‘To whom shall I write?’
“‘To Boleslav Kapshat, in the town Sventsiani, on the Warsaw railroad.’
“‘Well, what shall I write? Speak.’
“‘My dearest Boless, my heart’s delight, my beloved. May the Mother of God protect you! My golden heart, why have you not written for so long a time to your sorrowing dove, Teresa—’
“I could hardly keep from laughing. A sorrowing dove, indeed! Almost six feet tall, with the fists of a prize-fighter, and a face so black that it seemed as if the ‘dove’ had been sweeping chimneys all her life and had never thoroughly washed herself. But I somehow kept my face straight and asked:
“‘Who is this Bolesst?’
“‘Boless, Pan Student,’ she replied seemingly offended because of my mispronouncing the name. ‘He is my affianced.’
“‘Affianced!’
“‘And why are you so astonished? Can not I, a girl, have an affianced?’
“She—a girl! well, this beats everything I ever heard. Oh, well, who can tell about such matters! Everything is possible in this world.
“‘And have you been long engaged?’
“‘The sixth year.’
“‘Oh, oh!’ I thought and then said aloud: ‘Well, go ahead with your letter.’
“And I must confess—so tender and loving was this message—that I would have willingly exchanged places with this Boless had the fair correspondent been any one else but Teresa.
“‘I thank you from my inmost soul for your favor, Pan Student,’ Teresa said, bowing low. ‘Can I in any way be of service to you?’
“‘No, thank you.’
“‘But maybe the Pan’s shirts or trousers need mending?’
“This made me quite angry. I felt that this mastodon in petticoats was making the blood mount to my cheeks, and I told her quite sharply that her services were not required; and she departed.
“Two weeks or so passed. One evening I was sitting at my window, softly whistling and thinking hard how to get away from myself. I felt very bored. The weather was as nasty as it could be. To go out that evening was out of the question, and having nothing better to do I began from sheer ennui a course of self-analysis. This proved dull enough work, but there was nothing else to do. Suddenly the door opened, thank God! Some one was coming to see me.
“‘Are you very busy just now, Pan Student?’
“‘Teresa! H’m—’ I thought I would have preferred any one at all to her. Then I said aloud:
“‘No, what is it you want now?’
“‘I wish to ask the Pan Student to write me another letter.’
“‘Very well. Is it again to Boless you wish me to write?’
“‘No, this time I want you to write a letter from Boless to me.’
“‘Wha-at?’
“‘I beg your pardon, Pan Student. How stupid of me! It is not for me, this letter, but for a friend of mine, a man acquaintance; he has a fiancée. Her name is like mine, Teresa. He does not know how to write, so I want the Pan Student to write for him a letter to that Teresa—’
“I looked at her. She seemed very confused and frightened, and her fingers trembled. And though I failed at first to understand what was the matter with her I at last understood.
“‘Look here, my lady,’ I said to her. ‘You have been telling me a pack of lies. There are no Bolesses nor Teresas among your acquaintances. It is only a pretext for coming in here. I tell you outright that there is no use of coming sneaking around me, as I do not wish to have anything to do with you. Do you understand?’
“She grew very red in the face and I saw that she was strangely frightened and confused, and moved her lips so oddly, wishing to say something, without being able to say it. And somehow I began to think that I had misjudged her a little. There was something behind all this. But what?
“‘Pan Student,’ she suddenly began, but broke off, and turning toward the door walked out of the room.
“I remained with a very unpleasant feeling in my heart. I heard her shut her own door with a bang; evidently the poor girl was very angry—I thought the matter over and decided to go in to her and induce her to return; I would write her the letter she wished.
“I entered her room. She was sitting at the table with her head pressed in her hands.
“‘Teresa,’ I said, ‘will you listen to me a moment?’
“Whenever I come to this turn of the story I always feel very awkward and embarrassed. But let us return to my narrative. Seeing that she did not reply I repeated:
“‘Listen to me, my girl—’
“She sprang to her feet, came close up to me, with eyes flashing, and placing her two hands on my shoulders she began to whisper, or rather to hum in her deep bass voice:
“‘Look you here, Pan Student. What of it, what of it if there is no Boless? And what if there is no Teresa? What difference does it make to you? Is it so hard for you to draw a few lines on the paper! Oh, you! And I thought you such a good fellow, such a nice fair-haired little boy. Yes, it is true—there is no Boless, and there is no Teresa, there is only me! Well, what of it?’
“‘Allow me,’ I said greatly disconcerted by this reception. ‘What is it you are saying? Is there no Boless?’
“‘Yes, there is none. But what of it?’
“‘And no Teresa either?’
“‘No, no Teresa either; that is, yes, I am her.’
“I could not understand a word. I stared straight into her eyes, trying to determine which of us two had lost our reason. And she returned once more to the table, rummaged for some time in the drawer, and coming back to me said in an offended tone:
“‘Here is the letter you wrote for me, take it back. You do not wish to write me a second one anyway. Others will probably be kinder than you and would do so.’
“I recognized the letter she held out to me as the one I wrote for her to Boless. Humph!
“‘Look here, Teresa,’ I said to her. ‘Will you please explain to me what it all means? Why do you ask people to write letters for you when you do not find it necessary even to post them?’
“‘Post them? Where to?’
“‘Why, to this Boless, of course.’
“‘But he does not exist!’
“I really could not understand a word. There was nothing left for me to do but to spit and walk out of the room. But she explained herself.
“‘Well, what of it?’ she began in an offended voice. ‘He does not exist. He does not, so,’ and she extended her hands as if she could not herself clearly understand why he did not exist in reality. ‘But I want him to. Am I not as much of a human being as the others? Of course I—I know.—But it does no harm to any one, that I am writing to him.—’
“‘Allow me—to whom?’
“‘To Boless, of course.’
“‘But he does not exist.’
“‘Oh, Mother of God! What if he does not exist? He does not; still to me he does. And Teresa—this is myself, and he replies to my letters, and I write to him again.’
“I understood. I felt so sick at heart, so ashamed of myself to know that alongside of me, only three paces removed, lived a human being who had no one in the whole world to love and sympathize with her, and that this being had to invent a friend for herself.
“‘Here you have written a letter from me to Boless, and I gave it to another to read, and when I hear it read it really begins to seem to me as if there is a Boless. And then I ask that a letter be written from Boless to Teresa—that is to me. And when such a letter is written and is read to me then I am almost entirely convinced that there is a Boless, and that makes my life easier.’
“Yes, the devil take it all,” continued my acquaintance. “To make a long story short I began from that time on to write with the greatest punctuality twice a week letters to Boless and vice versa. I wrote splendid replies to her. She used to listen to my reading of those epistles and to weep in her bass voice. In return for this she used to mend my clothes and darn my socks.
“Three months later she was thrown into prison for some reason or other and by now she must surely be dead.”
My acquaintance blew the ashes from his cigarette, looked thoughtfully at the sky, and concluded:
“Y-e-s, the more a human being has drunk of the cup of bitterness the more ardently he longs for sweetness. And we, enveloped in our worn-out virtues and gazing at each other through the haze of self-sufficiency and convinced of our righteousness, fail to understand it.
“And the whole affair turns out very stupid, and very cruel. Fallen people we say—but who and what are those fallen ones? First of all they are human beings of the very same bone and blood, of the very same flesh and nerves as ourselves. We have been told the very same thing for whole ages, day in and day out. And we listen and—and the devil alone knows how stupid it all is! In reality we, too, are but fallen people and more deeply fallen too, probably—into the abyss of self-sufficiency, convinced of our own sinlessness and superiority, the superiority of our own nerves and brains over the nerves and brains of those who are only less crafty than we are, and who can not, as we can, feign a goodness they do not possess—but enough of this. It is all so old and stale—so old and stale indeed that one is ashamed to speak of it—”
FOOTNOTES:
[10]Pan is Polish for Mister.
