The Duel Read Free

woman requires a bedroom.”
    “Vanya, Vanya …” Samoylenko became embarrassed.
    “You’re an old child, a theoretician, but I’m a young old man, a pragmatist, and we’ll never understand one another. We’d better end this conversation. Mustafa,” Laevsky called out to the man, “what do we owe?”
    “No, no …” the doctor panicked, grabbing Laevsky by the arm. “I’ll pay for this. I ordered it. Put it on my tab!” he called out to Mustafa.
    The friends rose and silently proceeded along the embankment. They stopped where the boulevard began and parted with a handshake.
    “You’re really very spoiled, gentleman!” sighed Samoylenko. “Fate has sent you a young, attractive, educated woman—and you refuse it all. If God would send me even a hump-backed old woman, as long as she’s tender and kind, I would be, oh, so very happy! I’d live with her on my vineyard and …”
    Suddenly remembering himself, Samoylenko said:
    “And I’d let that old witch set up the samovar there, all by herself.” Having said goodbye to Laevsky, he proceeded along the boulevard. At those times when he—massive, majestic, with an austere expression on his face, in his lilywhite service jacket and his fabulously polished boots, his chest puffed out, regaled with the Order of Vladimir with a ribbon—walked along the boulevard he liked himself tremendously, and it seemed to him that the entire world was smiling upon him. He looked from one side to the other without turning his head and found the boulevard was abundantly landscaped with young cypresses, eucalyptus and that even the unattractive, anemic palms were indeed attractive and would provide broad shade with time, that the Circassians were an honest and hospitable people.
It’s strange that the Caucasus don’t appeal to Laevsky
, he thought,
very strange
. He encountered five armed soldiers who saluted him. A civil servant’s wife and her school-aged son passed along the sidewalk on the right side of the boulevard.
    “Maria Konstantinovna, good morning!” Samoylenkocalled out to her, smiling pleasantly. “Have you been for a swim? Ha-ha-ha … My regards to Nikodim Aleksandrich!”
    And he went on, continuing to smile pleasantly, until, seeing that he was about to encounter an approaching military medical assistant, suddenly scowled, stopped him and inquired:
    “Is there anyone at the infirmary?”
    “No one, Your Excellency.”
    “What’s that?”
    “No one, Your Excellency.”
    “Very good, carry on …”
    Majestically swaggering, he turned in the direction of a lemonade stand, where an old, buxom Jewess passing herself off as a Georgian sat behind the counter and said to her loudly, as though commanding a regiment:
    “Please be a dear, give me a soda water!”
    * “Nadezhda” is Russian for “hope.”

II
    Laevsky’s lack of love for Nadezhda Fyodorovna manifested itself mainly in that everything she said and did seemed a lie to him, or something resembling a lie, and everything that he read disparaging of women and love seemed as though it couldn’t apply better to himself, to Nadezhda Fyodorovna and to her husband. When he returned home she was sitting at the window, already dressed and coiffed, drinking coffee with an anxious expression on her face and flipping through the pages of a fat journal, and he thought tohimself that the act of drinking coffee is not such a stupendous event that it should merit an anxious expression, and that she had wasted time in vain on a fashionable hairstyle, as no one here appreciated it and it was all for nothing. And in the pages of the journal he saw a lie. He thought that just as she dressed and coiffed so that she would appear pretty, she read so that she would appear smart.
    “Would it be all right if I went swimming today?” she asked.
    “What? You’ll go or you won’t go, it’s not an earth-shattering event either way, I suppose …”
    “No, that’s why I’m asking, I wouldn’t want the