THE COLLECTED WORKS OF ANTON CHEKHOV. Anton Chekhov
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the pilules that you gave me then, and wondered what good there could be in them. Was it possible that those little grains, scarcely visible, could cure my immense, long-standing disease? That’s what I thought — unbeliever that I was! — and I smiled; but when I took the pilule — it was instantaneous! It was as though I had not been ill, or as though it had been lifted off me. My wife looked at me with her eyes starting out of her head and couldn’t believe it. ‘Why, is it you, Kolya?’ ‘Yes, it is I,’ I said. And we knelt down together before the ikon, and fell to praying for our angel: ‘Send her, O Lord, all that we are feeling!’ “
Zamuhrishen wipes his eyes with his sleeve gets up from his chair, and shows a disposition to drop on one knee again; but the lady checks him and makes him sit down.
“It’s not me you must thank,” she says, blushing with excitement and looking enthusiastically at the portrait of Father Aristark. “It’s not my doing…. I am only the obedient instrument . . It’s really a miracle. Rheumatism of eight years’ standing by one pilule of scrofuloso!”
“Excuse me, you were so kind as to give me three pilules. One I took at dinner and the effect was instantaneous! Another in the evening, and the third next day; and since then not a touch! Not a twinge anywhere! And you know I thought I was dying, I had written to Moscow for my son to come! The Lord has given you wisdom, our lady of healing! Now I am walking, and feel as though I were in Paradise. The Tuesday I came to you I was hobbling, and now I am ready to run after a hare…. I could live for a hundred years. There’s only one trouble, our lack of means. I’m well now, but what’s the use of health if there’s nothing to live on? Poverty weighs on me worse than illness…. For example, take this… It’s the time to sow oats, and how is one to sow it if one has no seed? I ought to buy it, but the money… everyone knows how we are off for money… .”
“I will give you oats, Kuzma Kuzmitch…. Sit down, sit down. You have so delighted me, you have given me so much pleasure that it’s not you but I that should say thank you!”
“You are our joy! That the Lord should create such goodness! Rejoice, Madam, looking at your good deeds!… While we sinners have no cause for rejoicing in ourselves…. We are paltry, poor-spirited, useless people… a mean lot…. We are only gentry in name, but in a material sense we are the same as peasants, only worse…. We live in stone houses, but it’s a mere make-believe… for the roof leaks. And there is no money to buy wood to mend it with.”
“I’ll give you the wood, Kuzma Kuzmitch.”
Zamuhrishen asks for and gets a cow too, a letter of recommendation for his daughter whom he wants to send to a boarding school, and… touched by the lady’s liberality he whimpers with excess of feeling, twists his mouth, and feels in his pocket for his handkerchief….
Marfa Petrovna sees a red paper slip out of his pocket with his handkerchief and fall noiselessly to the floor.
“I shall never forget it to all eternity …” he mutters, “and I shall make my children and my grandchildren remember it… from generation to generation. ‘See, children,’ I shall say, ‘who has saved me from the grave, who …’ “
When she has seen her patient out, the lady looks for a minute at Father Aristark with eyes full of tears, then turns her caressing, reverent gaze on the drug chest, the books, the bills, the armchair in which the man she had saved from death has just been sitting, and her eyes fall on the paper just dropped by her patient. She picks up the paper, unfolds it, and sees in it three pilules — the very pilules she had given Zamuhrishen the previous Tuesday.
“They are the very ones,” she thinks puzzled. “… The paper is the same…. He hasn’t even unwrapped them! What has he taken then? Strange…. Surely he wouldn’t try to deceive me!”
And for the first time in her ten years of practice a doubt creeps into Marfa Petrovna’s mind…. She summons the other patients, and while talking to them of their complaints notices what has hitherto slipped by her ears unnoticed. The patients, every one of them as though they were in a conspiracy, first belaud her for their miraculous cure, go into raptures over her medical skill, and abuse allopath doctors, then when she is flushed with excitement, begin holding forth on their needs. One asks for a bit of land to plough, another for wood, a third for permission to shoot in her forests, and so on. She looks at the broad, benevolent countenance of Father Aristark who has revealed the truth to her, and a new truth begins gnawing at her heart. An evil oppressive truth….
The deceitfulness of man!
THE FISH
Translation By Constance Garnett
A SUMMER morning. The air is still; there is no sound but the churring of a grasshopper on the river bank, and somewhere the timid cooing of a turtle-dove. Feathery clouds stand motionless in the sky, looking like snow scattered about…. Gerassim, the carpenter, a tall gaunt peasant, with a curly red head and a face overgrown with hair, is floundering about in the water under the green willow branches near an unfinished bathing shed…. He puffs and pants and, blinking furiously, is trying to get hold of something under the roots of the willows. His face is covered with perspiration. A couple of yards from him, Lubim, the carpenter, a young hunchback with a triangular face and narrow Chinese-looking eyes, is standing up to his neck in water. Both Gerassim and Lubim are in shirts and linen breeches. Both are blue with cold, for they have been more than an hour already in the water.
“But why do you keep poking with your hand?” cries the hunchback Lubim, shivering as though in a fever. “You blockhead! Hold him, hold him, or else he’ll get away, the anathema! Hold him, I tell you!”
“He won’t get away…. Where can he get to? He’s under a root,” says Gerassim in a hoarse, hollow bass, which seems to come not from his throat, but from the depths of his stomach. “He’s slippery, the beggar, and there’s nothing to catch hold of.”
“Get him by the gills, by the gills!”
“There’s no seeing his gills…. Stay, I’ve got hold of something…. I’ve got him by the lip… He’s biting, the brute!”
“Don’t pull him out by the lip, don’t — or you’ll let him go! Take him by the gills, take him by the gills…. You’ve begun poking with your hand again! You are a senseless man, the Queen of Heaven forgive me! Catch hold!”
“Catch hold!” Gerassim mimics him. “You’re a fine one to give orders…. You’d better come and catch hold of him yourself, you hunchback devil…. What are you standing there for?”
“I would catch hold of him if it were possible. But can I stand by the bank, and me as short as I am? It’s deep there.”
“It doesn’t matter if it is deep…. You must swim.”
The hunchback waves his arms, swims up to Gerassim, and catches hold of the twigs. At the first attempt to stand up, he goes into the water over his head and begins blowing up bubbles.
“I told you it was deep,” he says, rolling his eyes angrily. “Am I to sit on your neck or what?”
“Stand on a root… there are a lot of roots like a ladder.” The hunchback gropes for a root with his heel, and tightly gripping several twigs, stands on it…. Having got his balance, and established himself in his new position, he bends down, and trying not to get the water into his mouth, begins fumbling with his right hand among the roots. Getting entangled among the weeds and slipping on the mossy roots he finds his hand in contact with the sharp pincers of a crayfish.
“As though we wanted to see you, you demon!” says Lubim, and he angrily flings the crayfish on the bank.
At last his hand feels Gerassim’ s arm, and groping its way along it comes to something cold