THEY CAME FROM Moscow. She had long been a widow, “though the widow of a court councillor,”55 her husband had been in the service, left almost nothing “except two hundred roubles, though, in a pension. Well, what is two hundred roubles?” She raised Olya, though, and had her educated in high school . . . “And how she studied, how she studied; she was awarded a silver medal at graduation . . .” (Long tears here, naturally.) The deceased husband had lost nearly four thousand in capital with one merchant here in Petersburg. Suddenly this merchant became rich again. “I had papers, got some advice, they said, ‘Make a claim, you’re sure to get everything . . .’ So I began, and the merchant started to agree. ‘Go in person,’ they said. Olya and I made ready and came a month ago now. Our means were only so much; we took this room because it was the smallest, and we saw it was an honorable house, and that was the most important thing for us. We’re inexperienced women, anybody can offend us. Well, we paid you for a month, with one thing and another, Petersburg’s expensive, our merchant flatly refused us. ‘I don’t know who you are,’ and the paper I had was not in order, I understood that myself. So they advise me, ‘Go to this famous lawyer, he was a professor, not simply a lawyer, but a jurist, he’ll tell you for certain what to do.’ I took my last fifteen roubles to him; the lawyer came out, and didn’t listen to me for even three minutes: ‘I see,’ he says, ‘I know,’ he says, ‘if he wants to,’ he says, ‘the merchant will pay you back, if he doesn’t, he won’t, but if you start a case, you may have to pay more, best of all is to make peace.’ And he made a joke from the Gospel: ‘Agree with thine adversary,’ he says, ‘whiles thou art in the way, till thou hast paid the uttermost farthing.’56 He sends me away, laughing. That was the end of my fifteen roubles! I came to Olya, we sit facing each other, I began to weep. She doesn’t weep, she sits there proud, indignant. And she’s always been like that, all her life, even when she was little, she never sighed, never wept, so she sits, glaring terribly, it’s even eerie to look at her. And, would you believe it, I was afraid of her, completely afraid, long afraid; and I’d feel like whining now and then, but I don’t dare in front of her. I went to the merchant for a last time, wept my fill there. ‘All right,’ he says, and doesn’t even listen. Meanwhile, I must confess, since we hadn’t counted on staying so long, we’d already been without money for some time. I gradually began to pawn my clothes, and we lived on that. We pawned everything we had, she began giving up her last bit of linen, and here I started weeping bitter tears. She stamped her foot, jumped up, and ran to the merchant herself. He’s a widower; he talked to her: ‘Come the day after tomorrow at five o’clock,’ he said, ‘maybe I’ll tell you something.’ She came back cheered up: ‘See,’ she says, ‘maybe he’ll tell me something.’ Well, I was glad, too, only my heart somehow went cold in me: what’s going to happen, I think, but I don’t dare ask her. Two days later she came back from the merchant pale, all trembling, threw herself on the bed—I understood everything, but I don’t dare ask. What do you think: he gave her fifteen roubles, the robber, ‘and if I meet with full honor in you,’ he says, ‘I’ll add another forty roubles.’ That’s what he said right to her face, shamelessly. She rushed at him then, she told me, but he pushed her back and even locked himself away from her in another room. And meanwhile, I confess to you in all conscience, we have almost nothing to eat. We took and sold a jacket lined with rabbit fur, and she went to the newspaper and advertised: preparation in all subjects, and also arithmetic. ‘They’ll pay at least thirty kopecks,’ she says. And towards the very end, dear lady, I even began to be horrified at her: she says nothing to me, sits for hours on end at the window, looking at the roof of the house opposite, and suddenly shouts: ‘At least to do laundry, at least to dig the earth!’ She’d shout just some word like that and stamp her foot. And we have no acquaintances here, there’s nobody to go to: ‘What will become of us?’ I think. And I keep being afraid to talk to her. Once she slept in the afternoon, woke up, opened her eyes, looked at me; I sit on the chest, also looking at her; she got up silently, came over to me, embraced me very, very tightly, and then the two of us couldn’t help ourselves and wept, we sit and weep, without letting go of each other’s arms. It was the first time like that in her whole life. So we’re sitting like that with each other, and your Nastasya comes in and says, ‘There’s some lady asking to see you.’ This was just four days ago. The lady comes in. We see she’s very well dressed, speaks Russian, but with what seems like a German accent: ‘You advertised in the newspaper,’ she says, ‘that you give lessons?’ We were so glad then, asked her to sit down, she laughs so sweetly: ‘It’s not me,’ she says, ‘but my niece has small children; if you like, kindly come to see us, we’ll discuss things there.’ She gave the address, by the Voznesensky Bridge, number such-and-such, apartment number such-and-such. She left. Olechka set off, she went running that same day, and what then? She came back two hours later in hysterics, thrashing. Later she told me: ‘I asked the caretaker,’ she says, ‘where apartment number such-and-such was. The caretaker looked at me,’ she says. ‘ “And what,” he says, “do you want with that apartment?” He said it so strangely that I might have thought better of it.’ But she was imperious, impatient, she couldn’t stand these questions and rudeness. ‘Go,’ he says, jabbing his finger towards the stairs, turned and went back to his lodge. And what do you think? She goes in, asks, and women come running at once from all sides: ‘Come in, come in!’—all the women, laughing, painted, foul, piano-playing, rush to her and pull her. ‘I tried to get out of there,’ she says, ‘but they wouldn’t let me go.’ She got frightened, her legs gave way under her, they don’t let her go, and then it’s all sweet talk, coaxing her, they opened a bottle of port, give it to her, insist. She jumped up, shouting with all her might, trembling: ‘Let me go, let me go!’ She rushed to the door, they hold the door, she screams; then the one that had come to us ran up to her, slapped my Olya twice in the face, and shoved her out the door: ‘You’re not worthy, you slut,’ she says, ‘to be in a noble house!’ And another shouts after her on the stairs: ‘You came here yourself, since you’ve got nothing to eat, but we wouldn’t even look at such a mug!’ All that night she lay in a fever, raving, and the next morning her eyes flashed, she’d get up and pace: ‘To court,’ she says, ‘I’ll take her to court!’ I said nothing: well, I thought, what can you do about it in court, what can you prove? She paces, she wrings her hands, her tears pour down, her lips are pressed together, unmoving. And since that same time, her whole face turned dark till the very end. On the third day she felt better, she was silent, she seemed to have calmed down. It was then, at four o’clock in the afternoon, that Mr. Versilov paid us a visit.
