The Duel Read Free Page A

doctor to be upset with me.”
    “Well, go ask the doctor, then. I’m not a doctor.”
    This time what Laevsky disliked most of all about Nadezhda Fyodorovna was her white, exposed neck and the curls of hair on the nape of her neck, and he remembered that when Anna Karenina had fallen out of love with her husband, she began to dislike his ears above all else, and he thought to himself:
How true it is! How true!
Feeling weak and empty headed, he went into his study, lay down on the divan and covered his face with a handkerchief, so that the flies would not irritate him. Languid, torpid thoughts all about one and the same thing stretched out through his brain like a long wagon train in foul autumnal weather and he fell into a drowsy, dejected state. It seemed to him that he was culpable before Nadezhda Fyodorovna and before her husband, and that her husband’s death had been all his fault. It seemed to him that he was culpable before hislife, which he’d ruined, before the world of grand ideas, knowledge and labor, and he imagined that wonder-filled world to be possible and to exist not here on this shore, where hungry Turks and lazy Abkhazians wandered about, but there to the north, where there is opera, theater, newspapers and all sorts of cerebral labor. To be honest, smart, outspoken and pure was only possible there, not here. He blamed himself for not having ideals or a master plan in life, as he dimly realized now what this meant. Two years earlier, when he had fallen in love with Nadezhda Fyodorovna, he had been convinced that all he had to do was run off with Nadezhda Fyodorovna and to set off with her for the Caucasus, thus he would be spared the banality and emptiness of life; he was now equally convinced that all he had to do was cast off Nadezhda Fyodorovna and set off for Petersburg, thereby attaining all that he required.
    “Run!” he muttered to himself, sitting and gnawing his nails. “Run!”
    His imagination unfurled: there he is boarding a steamship and then sitting down to breakfast, drinking cold beer, chatting with the ladies on deck, then in Sevastopol boarding a train and traveling. Hello, freedom! The stations flicker past one after the other, the air becomes ever colder and harsher, now birch and spruce trees, now Kursk, Moscow … Shchi in the buffets, lamb with kasha, sturgeon, beer—in a word, not the Asiatic, but Russia, the real Russia. The passengers on the train speak of trade, the latest singers, of Franco-Russian affinity; everywhere the feeling of animated, cultured, intelligent, exhilarating life … Faster, faster! Here,at last, is Nevsky, Bolshaya Morskaya, and there’s Kovensky Lane, where he had once lived among students, there’s the dear, gray sky, misty rain, wet coach-drivers …
    “Ivan Andreich!” someone called out from the neighboring room. “Are you home?”
    “I’m here!” Laevsky answered. “What do you need?”
    “Papers.”
    Laevsky rose lazily, with a feeling of dizziness and, yawning, his shoes smacking the floor, went to the neighboring room. There in the street, in front of the open window, stood one of his young colleagues, who laid official papers out on the windowsill.
    “Just a minute, my good man,” Laevsky said softly, and went to find pen and ink. Returning to the window, he signed the papers without reading them and said: “It’s hot!”
    “Yes sir. Are you coming in today?”
    “Unlikely … I think I’m coming down with something … My good man, tell Sheshkovsky that I’ll come see him after dinner.”
    The clerk left. Laevsky lay down on the divan in his room again and began to think:
    Now then, it’s necessary to weigh all the factors and to figure this out. Before leaving this place, I must pay my debts. I owe nearly two thousand rubles. I have no money … This, of course, isn’t important. I’ll pay half now somehow, and the other half I’ll send from Petersburg. Most important is Nadezhda Fyodorovna … First and