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A.P. Chekhov
- The Student
At first the weather was fine and still. The
thrushes were calling, and in the swamps close by something
alive droned pitifully with a sound like blowing into an empty
bottle. A snipe flew by, and the shot aimed at it rang out with
a gay, resounding note in the spring air. But when it began to
get dark in the forest a cold, penetrating wind blew
inappropriately from the east, and everything sank into silence.
Needles of ice stretched across the pools, and it felt
cheerless, remote, and lonely in the forest. There was a whiff
of winter.
Ivan Velikopolsky, the son of a sacristan, and a student of the
clerical academy, returning home from shooting, kept walking on
the path by the water-logged meadows. His fingers were numb and
his face was burning with the wind. It seemed to him that the
cold that had suddenly come on had destroyed the order and
harmony of things, that nature itself felt ill at ease, and that
was why the evening darkness was falling more rapidly than
usual. All around it was deserted and peculiarly gloomy. The
only light was one gleaming in the widows' gardens near the
river; the village, over three miles away, and everything in the
distance all round was plunged in the cold evening mist. The
student remembered that, as he had left the house, his mother
was sitting barefoot on the floor in the entryway, cleaning the
samovar, while his father lay on the stove coughing; as it was
Good Friday nothing had been cooked, and the student was
terribly hungry. And now, shrinking from the cold, he thought
that just such a wind had blown in the days of Rurik and in the
time of Ivan the Terrible and Peter, and in their time there had
been just the same desperate poverty and hunger, the same
thatched roofs with holes in them, ignorance, misery, the same
desolation around, the same darkness, the same feeling of
oppression -- all these had existed, did exist, and would exist,
and the lapse of a thousand years would make life no better. And
he did not want to go home.
The gardens were called the widows' because they were kept by
two widows, mother and daughter. A campfire was burning brightly
with a crackling sound, throwing out light far around on the
ploughed earth. The widow Vasilisa, a tall, fat old woman in a
man's coat, was standing by and looking thoughtfully into the
fire; her daughter Lukerya, a little pockmarked woman with a
stupid-looking face, was sitting on the ground, washing a
cauldron and spoons. Apparently they had just had supper. There
was a sound of men's voices; it was the laborers watering their
horses at the river.
"Here you have winter back again," said the student, going up to
the campfire. "Good evening."
Vasilisa started, but at once recognized him and smiled
cordially.
"I did not know you; God bless you," she said. "You'll be rich."
They talked. Vasilisa, a woman of experience who had been in
service with the gentry, first as a wet-nurse, afterwards as a
children's nurse expressed herself with refinement, and a soft,
sedate smile never left her face; her daughter Lukerya, a
village peasant woman who had been beaten by her husband, simply
screwed up her eyes at the student and said nothing, and she had
a strange expression like that of a deaf-mute.
"At just such a fire the Apostle Peter warmed himself," said the
student, stretching out his hands to the fire, "so it must have
been cold then, too. Ah, what a terrible night it must have
been, granny! An utterly dismal long night!"
He looked round at the darkness, shook his head abruptly and
asked:
"No doubt you have heard the reading of the Twelve Apostles?"
"Yes, I have," answered Vasilisa.
"If you remember, at the Last Supper Peter said to Jesus, 'I am
ready to go with Thee into darkness and unto death.' And our
Lord answered him thus: 'I say unto thee, Peter, before the cock
croweth thou wilt have denied Me thrice.' After the supper Jesus
went through the agony of death in the garden and prayed, and
poor Peter was weary in spirit and faint, his eyelids were heavy
and he could not struggle against sleep. He fell asleep. Then
you heard how Judas the same night kissed Jesus and betrayed Him
to His tormentors. They took Him bound to the high priest and
beat Him, while Peter, exhausted, worn out with misery and
alarm, hardly awake, you know, feeling that something awful was
just going to happen on earth, followed behind. . . . He loved
Jesus passionately, intensely, and now he saw from far off how
He was beaten. . . ."
Lukerya left the spoons and fixed an immovable stare upon the
student.
"They came to the high priest's," he went on; "they began to
question Jesus, and meantime the laborers made a fire in the
yard as it was cold, and warmed themselves. Peter, too, stood
with them near the fire and warmed himself as I am doing. A
woman, seeing him, said: 'He was with Jesus, too' -- that is as
much as to say that he, too, should be taken to be questioned.
And all the laborers that were standing near the fire must have
looked sourly and suspiciously at him, because he was confused
and said: 'I don't know Him.' A little while after again someone
recognized him as one of Jesus' disciples and said: 'Thou, too,
art one of them,' but again he denied it. And for the third time
someone turned to him: 'Why, did I not see thee with Him in the
garden today?' For the third time he denied it. And immediately
after that time the cock crowed, and Peter, looking from afar
off at Jesus, remembered the words He had said to him in the
evening. . . . He remembered, he came to himself, went out of
the yard and wept bitterly -- bitterly. In the Gospel it is
written: 'He went out and wept bitterly.' I imagine it: the
still, still, dark, dark garden, and in the stillness, faintly
audible, smothered sobbing.. . . ."
The student sighed and sank into thought. Still smiling,
Vasilisa suddenly gave a gulp, big tears flowed freely down her
cheeks, and she screened her face from the fire with her sleeve
as though ashamed of her tears, and Lukerya, staring immovably
at the student, flushed crimson, and her expression became
strained and heavy like that of someone enduring intense pain.
The laborers came back from the river, and one of them riding a
horse was quite near, and the light from the fire quivered upon
him. The student said good-night to the widows and went on. And
again the darkness was about him and his fingers began to be
numb. A cruel wind was blowing, winter really had come back and
it did not feel as though Easter would be the day after
tomorrow.
Now the student was thinking about Vasilisa: since she had shed
tears all that had happened to Peter the night before the
Crucifixion must have some relation to her. . . .
He looked round. The solitary light was still gleaming in the
darkness and no figures could be seen near it now. The student
thought again that if Vasilisa had shed tears, and her daughter
had been troubled, it was evident that what he had just been
telling them about, which had happened nineteen centuries ago,
had a relation to the present -- to both women, to the desolate
village, to himself, to all people. The old woman had wept, not
because he could tell the story touchingly, but because Peter
was near to her, because her whole being was interested in what
was passing in Peter's soul.
And joy suddenly stirred in his soul, and he even stopped for a
minute to take breath. "The past," he thought, "is linked with
the present by an unbroken chain of events flowing one out of
another." And it seemed to him that he had just seen both ends
of that chain; that when he touched one end the other quivered.
When he crossed the river by the ferryboat and afterwards,
mounting the hill, looked at his village and towards the west
where the cold crimson sunset lay a narrow streak of light, he
thought that truth and beauty which had guided human life there
in the garden and in the yard of the high priest had continued
without interruption to this day, and had evidently always been
the chief thing in human life and in all earthly life, indeed;
and the feeling of youth, health, vigor -- he was only
twenty-two -- and the inexpressible sweet expectation of
happiness, of unknown mysterious happiness, took possession of
him little by little, and life seemed to him enchanting,
marvellous, and full of lofty meaning.
NOTES
in the days of Rurik: a late 9th century Viking prince of
Novgorod, traditional founder of the Rurikid line which ruled
Russia from 862 to 1598
Ivan the Terrible and Peter: Ivan IV (1530-1584), Tsar of
Muscovy; Peter was Peter I (1672-1725), the first Russian
emperor
be rich: Russian folklore is that failure to recognize a person
whom one knows means that the person will become rich
Twelve Apostles: 12 pre-determined selections from the Gospels
read on Holy Thursday before Easter
At the last supper: the student's quotations come from Mark 14,
Luke 22, and John 18
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