27 September - 3 October
UNIT 4: The 5 Paragraph Essay and the Library
Self-Quiz Unit 4
Learning Guide Unit 4
Overview
Unit 4: The 5 Paragraph Essay and the Library
Topics:- The 5 paragraph essay
- Using the UoPeople Library
- Topic vs Thesis
- African and Russian short stories
Learning Objectives:By the end of this Unit, you will be able to:- Comprehend the structure of the 5 paragraph essay.
- Explore the UoPeople Library for research.
- Differentiate between a topic and a thesis.
- Analyze different writing styles and cultural themes.
Tasks:- Read the Learning Guide and Reading Assignments
- Participate in the Discussion Assignment (post, comment, and rate in the Discussion Forum)
- Complete and submit the Written Assignment
- Make entries to the Learning Journal
- Take the Self-Quiz
Introduction
This unit will focus on the 5 paragraph essay, how to use the UoPeople Library for research and the difference between a topic and a thesis. It will also include a reading from either an African or Russian writer that you will discuss in the Discussion Forum. Your Written Assignment is to create a 5 paragraph paper of your own based upon the thesis and outline you handed in last week. This will be assessed by your peers. Finally, your Learning Journal this week will an area just for you to assess your own progress and to write a note to your teacher on your assessment.Although not required, it is strongly suggested to take the Self-Quiz as they will prove useful study guides for the Graded Quizzes later in the unit.Reading AssignmentThe following will be used for this week's Reading Assignment:- Pick one of the following (or find your own short story from either Africa or Russia):
- African short story, ‘My Father’s Head’ by Okwiri Oduor at: http://bookslive.co.za/blog/2013/09/06/fiction-friday-okwiri-oduors-short-story-day-africa-winning-story-my-fathers-head/
- Stories by Anton Chekhov:
- Story by Irene Nemirovsky 'Monsieur Rose' http://esl-bits.net/ESL.English.Listening.Short.Stories/Monsieur.Rose/01/default.html
There is an optional handout on medium-level verb conjugations here: PDF
Discussion Forum Unit 4
IV Discussion Assignment
IV Discussion AssignmentFor your Discussion Assignment, you will practice using APA Citations to give credit to the source of the information you read. This is crucial since not giving credit (plagiarism) can lead to a Fail for the assignment, the course, and even have you expelled from the university.You will choose one of the stories from the reading and you will use the UoPeople Library to research information about the story. For example, this information might come from reviews by others, biographies, or textbooks. You will then write two or three sentences on what you’ve found for research and how it does (or does not) concur with your concept of the story.You will include:- One quote formatted using APA in-text citation style.
- One paraphrase formatted using APA in-text citation style.
- The full reference information formatted using APA Reference section style (if you need help with the reference material, you can use www.bibme.org but make sure you select APA and not MLA).
Remember, except for the credited source information this is to be your own original work.You are also responsible for replying with two or three sentences to three different students and rating their main posts from 1 (poor) to 10 (excellent) in the Rate box provided.209 wordsRe: IV Discussion Assignment‘My Father’s Head’ by Okwiri OduorMost of the time, different people do not come up with the same ideas of their belief. But they can agree at the end. “Much of our success depends on the individual who is able to reach up out of the mud puddle of technological breakdown or un shelved books to make a difference” (Cart, 2007, P.8). Almost all of us needs someone who leads us to be a success (Cart, 2007). I cannot agree with this as we can see so many people can do something great on their own. “My Father’s Head” as well, tells us how we can get something when it gets lost even though there is much pressure from outside.RefencesCart, M. (2007). Teacher-librarian as literacy leader. Teacher Librarian:Retrieved from http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/140 wordsRe: IV Discussion AssignmentHello, Tola.Could you summarize the story for us, please?10 wordsRe: IV Discussion Assignment‘My Father’s Head’ by Okwiri OduorWell, the story is about the invisibale head of the author’s father. The author was very anxious to know what his father’s head looks like. The story is a bit unconvincing, meaning it looks as if it was existing only in myths and did not seem real. The end of the story is that the author was able to see it. His Father’s head was shaped like a butternut squash. Perhaps that was the reason he had forgotten all about it.Most of the time, different people do not come up with the same ideas of their belief. But they can agree at the end. “Much of our success depends on the individual who is able to reach up out of the mud puddle of technological breakdown or un shelved books to make a difference” (Cart, 2007, P.8). Almost all of us needs someone who leads us to be a success (Cart, 2007). I cannot agree with this as we can see so many people can do something great on their own. “My Father’s Head” as well, tells us how we can get something when it gets lost even though there is much pressure from outside.RefencesCart, M. (2007). Teacher-librarian as literacy leader. Teacher Librarian:Retrieved from http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/221 wordsRe: IV Discussion AssignmentI have chosen the story by Chekhov called: “the bet” for this week Chekhov, A. (1995).The story narrates about a bet in which If a lawyer was able to pass fifty years in prison, he will be paid two millions from a banker.I have researched some articles about the novel in the library but it provided me with very poor material on working on.I have found just one interesting review of the story and I totally agree with the author when she wrote: “The Bet” leaves many questions unanswered. A winner of the bet is not declared. There is a climax when the banker intends to murder the lawyer, but there is no conclusion or epilogue; only an abrupt ending to the story of two men whose lives have been thrown together for fifteen years after a bizarre series of events.” (Constantakis, 2018, p. 12).The story is poor and the end meaningless. Instead, I like how Constantakis connected the novel in the historical context when Russia, the Birthplace of Chekhov, has just quitted the autocracy of feudal system and the intellectuals could criticize the new socio political ideas through this kind of stories (Constantakis, 2018).ReferencesChekhov, A. (1995) Pymble, N.S.W. : Angus & Robertson.Constantakis, S. (2018, Dec). Gale Virtual Reference Library, Retrieved fromhttp://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/CX1999300012/GVRL?u=lirn17237&sid=GVRL&xid=b1d537a8.231 wordsRe: IV Discussion AssignmentGood, Matteo Sebastiano! Could you correct just '.....events.” (Constantakis, 2018, p. 12).' as '……..events” (Constantakis, 2018, p. 12).' please. One period at the end of your in text citation instead of two after quoted speech and citation respectively.38 wordsRe: IV Discussion AssignmentHello, Matteo.How do you think that the sociopolitical context in which the story was written influences the story?19 wordsRe: IV Discussion AssignmentHello MatteoGood in text citation and paraphrasingExcpet than the period that Tola had showed I also didn't find anything.19 wordsRe: IV Discussion AssignmentHi Matto,You did a good job!The review, the citation, and the paraphrase.14 wordsRe: IV Discussion AssignmentHello Matteo,That's an interesting point of view. I read the same story but came to a completely different conclusion. From my point of view ''The Bet'' by Chehkov isn't about who won or who lost the bet. It shows us how humans' mental health gets affected by isolation and that truly wise people don't care about material things. But I guess this is what books are about; receiving information and interpreting it in our own way.Regards,Marianna79 wordsRe: IV Discussion AssignmentI chose The Bagger by Anton Chekhov.“Lushkov was once a beggar, he bagged Skvortsov who was a Petersburg lawyer, the means to go to Kaluga province, and it seemed to him that he knows the man from the Sadovoy Street. Skvortsov was so annoyed that he could bag lying, yet he had strength to work. he was given a wok to chop trees and later on because he was behaving well; not bagging and drinking like he used to do, Skvortsov recommend him to go to his colleague to do a copying job on a condition of not being a drunkard and to remember his words, that he had told him to work hard. After two years working there, the two met at theater and Lushkov was so thankful to Skvortsov and explained how Olga, the Skvortsov cook help him to chop the trees, and her words to him that shaped his life. Lushkov bowed and went off to the gallery”. Chekhov, A.(n.d), The Beggar.ReferenceChekhov, A. (n.d). The Beggar.http://esl-bits.net/ESL.English.Listening.Short.Stories/Chekhov/The.Beggar/default.html188 wordsRe: IV Discussion AssignmentHi, Olivier Dushimimana
Good! But the instructor asked in-text paraphrased citation too.11 wordsRe: IV Discussion AssignmentThe story I selected is "My Father’s Head" by Okwiri Oduor. I searched for the story and I found a lot of opinions. The comment was also on the Swahili dialect in the story that embodied the values and customs of Kenya. It concurs with my concept of the story.One quote formatted using APA in-text citation style."Father Ignatius’ maiden sermon was about love: love your neighbor as you love yourself, that kind of self-deprecating thing. The old people had little use for love, and although they gave Father Ignatius an ingratiating smile, what they really wanted to know was what type of place Kitgum was, and if it was true that the Bagisu people were savage cannibals."(Oduor, 2013, p. 12).One paraphrase formatted using APA in-text citation style.I know that man makes us love him in some way or not love him, and we distribute our love to people in bottles fit the size of our love for them(Oduor, 2013).The full reference information formatted using APA Reference section style.(Oduor. O. 2013. My Father’s Head. Kenya: Africa 39).184 wordsRe: IV Discussion AssignmentHi, Younes Alshikh
Good! Could you research and cite another sources for your assignment, please.14 wordsRe: IV Discussion Assignmentأعجبتني الاقتباس ، لكن إعادة الصياغة لم تكن واضØØ©8 wordsRe: IV Discussion Assignment’’The wrong box: our prisons' use of solitary confinement is inhumane’’ written by Tim Heffernan and Graeme Wood suggests that ’’The Bet’’ by Anton Chehkov is ’’The greatest fictional depiction of solitary confinement’’ (Heffernan and Wood, 2015, p.33). Heffernan and Wood reasonably argue that, based on Chehkov’s story as well, 15 years of isolation from the world have a very negative impact on someone’s mental health (Heffernan and Wood, 2015); a point of view I personally agree with, as in my opinion isolation is the worst of all punishments.ReferencesHeffernan, T. and Wood, G. (2015). The wrong box: our prisons' use of solitary confinement is inhumane. New York: National Review112 wordsRe: IV Discussion AssignmentTHE BET
"Life in prison and the death penalty are two ways of life: life in prison can make you analyze and repent and be forgiven by others." The death penalty is a cruel and difficult moment, but the death penalty will not heal the suffering of the family victim.References: (Nydia, 2018)APA:There are multiple ways of punishment. Life imprisonment and execution, life imprisonment can be a solution because it can make a person face his mistakes and repent and retreatThe death penalty is cruel, because it will not change or meet the goal, because it does not heal the victim's pain.References:Chekhov, A. 1860. Betting, Literary Network:www.online-literature.com/anton_chekhov/1255/I liked the story, I admire Chekhov's novels, I agree with Nidia's view of the story,That my opinion is similar to her opinion, looking for an opinion on the story was fun I have read more about Chikhov's biography and his life.You will write two or three sentences about what you found for the artist (or incompatibility) with your concept of the story.181 wordsRe: IV Discussion AssignmentDear Younma,I really liked the point of view you quoted because it gives a partially positive vibe in this sad topic. However, I find both punishments inhumane. Isolation for me is like slow death. In my opinion the fact that some prisoners might educate themselves by reading books or become better people doesn't mean that they don't suffer. Furthermore, I believe that no one should have the right to kill another human being regardless of his actions.RegardsMarianna79 wordsThe Beggar by Anton ChekhovI have chosen The Beggar by Anton Chekhov.I didn't find any material about this story in the uopeople library but I google it to get some help."First published in 1887. Translated from the Russian by Constance Garnett. The Tales of Chekhov, Vol. 8: The Horse Stealer and Other Stories." (Coulehan, 2003, para 5 & 6).A lawyer (Skvortsov) met a beggar Lushkov), who claimed to be a teacher and laid off without justification; however, the lawyer remembered he had impoverished that to be a student some other day. The beggar admits that he was a drunk without work, and reluctantly accepted the wood chopping job which was offered by Skvortsov. The cook (Olga) takes Lushkov to the wood stack. Then after, Lushkov started to do odd jobs; sometime after, Skvortsov sets him in a clerical position. Two years later, Skvortsov met him in the theatre. Skvortsov pride himself for saving Lushkov from drunkenness, but Lushkov revealed that Olga had saved him; she chopped the wood, so compassion showed by her led the change in his heart (Coulehan, 2003).This story shows the positive change in the life of Lushkov because of compassion that was shown by Olga, though the lawyer (Skvortsov) became proud by thinking he was the one who saved the beggar. As in the article, I think simple compassion can bring bigger change in someone's life, so the review concurs with my concept the story.Reference:Coulehan, J. (2003, May, 27). The Beggar. Retrieved from http://medhum.med.nyu.edu/view/1569255 wordsRe: The Beggar by Anton Chekhovyou've given a shortcut to the story, it's goodBut I think you just have to give an opinion on the story, write what you found for the research.Beautiful wording30 wordsRe: The Beggar by Anton ChekhovGood Shankar,But you didn't use the UoPeople Library to research information about the story.Best of Luck,18 wordsRe: The Beggar by Anton ChekhovHi Younes,We chose the same story! I hope you too enjoyed it.You kind of wrote a long summary, it could be shorter.But in general, you did great.Good luck!32 wordsRe: The Beggar by Anton ChekhovHello Shankar,I read both ''The Bet'' and ''The Beggar'' and I really liked the moral of the story you chose. I agree with your opinion; Skvortsov's lack of empathy didn't help the beggar. Instead, Olga's words and most importantly her compassionate actions inspired the beggar to become a better person. In my opinion, the only good thing that he received from Skvortsov was the opportunity to meet Olga.Regards,Marianna71 wordsRe: IV Discussion AssignmentFirst of all, I am sorry, but from all the research I have made trying to come up with the proper content to fulfill this assignment, it’s a bit hard to write just two or three sentences about what I have found. Perhaps I will get some insights when I’m able to read my colleagues contributions to this forum.
I searched the Library throughly and I honestly couldn’t find many peer-reviewed references that talked specifically about Chekhov’s The Bet. I am guessing this might be because this text of Chekhov is somewhat unknown, maybe because it is a short story and not really a play? It might be easy for The Bet to become “lost” among so many short stories written by Chekhov, such as “Lights”, "A Slander", “Angel” and "At Sea - a Sailor's Story", just to mention a few (Murray, 1995). I found out that some of his more notorious texts are plays, such as Uncle Vanya (1963, 1971), The Three Sisters (1966) and The Seagull (1971) and that those have been adapted to screen (Olshankskay, 2000), even when they were just “filming famous theatrical performances without much genre adjustment” (Olshankskay, 2000, p. 1). As far as I can tell, The Bet hasn’t been adapted to screen yet and that itself could be an indication of the text’s popularity (or, in this case, the lack thereof).
I ought to mention that I did find a quite interesting article about the transnational circulation of books. From it, I gathered that The Bet seems to have been translated to English for the first time in 1915 (Gamsa, 2011). Studying how Russian stories ended up being published in China, Gamsa (2011) also talks says: “in the United States, the publication of Best Russian Short Stories in July 1917” (p.7) and he indicates that The Bet was part of this collection. Because of copyright laws and agreements, this book is now Public Domain and it is available on-line (1).
I also found a more general article analyzing Chekhov’s late work. In it, Davis (1998) points out that “Chekhov's aversion to speechifying, his unerring ability to disappear behind his work, appeals to modern readers” (p. 3). This concurs with my thoughts about The Bet. I think it is possible to say that the author disappears behind the characters and the plot he devised. The character’s ideas seem to be their own; their decisions are justified by the story itself, even when these decisions end up emulating what Johnson called Chekhov’s “great belief in the freedom of the individual” (as quoted in Murray, 1995, p.2), for instance, at the end of the story.
Original text:
““The Bet” was found in The Bet and Other Stories by Anton Tchekhov, trans. S. Koteliansky and J. M. Murry (Dublin: Maunsel and Co., 1915), part of that publisher's Modern Russian Library.” (Gamsa, 2011, p. 17)
The paraphrase formatted using APA in-text citation style was this one:
….The Bet seems to have been translated to English for the first time in 1915. (Gamsa, 2011)(1) WikiSource offers a readable copyright-free version of the book:https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Best_Russian_Short_StoriesREFERENCES:
Chekhov, A. (n.d.). The Bet by Anton Chekhov. Retrieved May 9, 2018, from http://www.online-literature.com/anton_chekhov/1255/
Davis, C. (1998). Chronicler of a dying world. The Wilson Quarterly, 22(4), 95+. Retrieved from http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A21240870/EAIM?u=lirn17237&sid=EAIM&xid=5807dad9
Gamsa, M. (2011). Cultural translation and the transnational circulation of books. Journal of World History, 22(3), 553+. Retrieved from http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A265194991/AONE?u=lirn17237&sid=AONE&xid=c80cb555
Murray, B. (1995). Anton Chekhov: A Study of the Short Fiction. Studies in Short Fiction, 32(1), 134+. Retrieved from http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A17156455/AONE?u=lirn17237&sid=AONE&xid=96d5a918
Olshankskay, N. L. (2000). Opposition or Identification: Chekhov's Plays On Screen. West Virginia University Philological Papers, 47, 69+. Retrieved from http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A80849945/AONE?u=lirn17237&sid=AONE&xid=1dbf0603676 wordsRe: IV Discussion AssignmentERRATAI'm sorry, 5 minutes is not nearly enough to re-read a post as long as this one for the third time and make the corrections you only realize should have been made after you see the published text. There is an extra word in: "Studying how Russian stories ended up being published in China, Gamsa (2011) also talks says", obviously I did not mean for two words with the same meaning to be there, so please don't take consideration "talks" into consideration when reading it. Thank you!87 wordsRe: IV Discussion AssignmentAlso: from the instructions I did not get that we were supposed to summarize the story as well. But since I saw the instructor requesting for it, I'm complementing my answer:What I chose to read and why:I chose to read Chekhov’s The Bet because it is a story that I had very much enjoyed to dwell on while I was in high school, about twenty years ago, and I was curious to revisit it with the eyes of the present.Summary:The Bet is told from the point of view of a banker who gave a party at his home, during which a debate about capital punishment vs imprisonment for life erupted. When a young lawyer said that both were immoral, but that he would rather choose the latter, because “to live anyhow is better than not at all” (Chekhov, 2018, p.1), the host bet two millions that the lawyer would not be able to spend fifteen years of his life in confinement (Chekhov, 2018, p.1). We meet the banker on the very eve of those fifteen years being completed and find out what was the outcome of that bet.REFERENCE:
Chekhov, A. (n.d.). The Bet by Anton Chekhov. Retrieved May 9, 2018, from http://www.online-literature.com/anton_chekhov/1255216 wordsRe: IV Discussion AssignmentI chose to read "The Beggar"The story is about lawyer (Skvortsoff) and the beggar (Luskoff), the lawyer offer the beggar a job chopping wood and save his life. later after Skvortsoff sees Luskoff at the theater he was proud of what he did with him.Information about the story from UoPeople Library:The characters in “The Beggar” are not sufficiently well-drawn to give depth to the narrative. “The Beggar,” however, with its straightforward simplicity, is closer to the spirit of Tolstoy’s thought than any other Chekhov story.My opinion about the information:I do not agree with this information, because Chekhov avoid descriptions to show us the general life in Czarita Russia.One quote formatted using APA in-text citation style:The beggar shrugged his shoulders as though puzzled, and irresolutely followed the cook. It was evident from his demeanour that he had consented to go and chop wood, not because he was hungry and wanted to earn money, but simply from shame and amour propre, because he had been taken at his word.(Chekhov,1887)One paraphrase formatted using APA in-text citation style:The beggar consent to go and chop wood, not because he was hungry and need to earn money but just because he give his word.Reference:Chekhov, A.(1887). The Beggar.214 wordsRe: IV Discussion AssignmentHi Hassan,You chose a nice story!All parts are well done, except the reference; I think you forgot to mention the publishing company and city.Good job!28 wordsRe: IV Discussion AssignmentThank You Monzer.Here the full reference:The Artist Emerges, 1885-1887Chekhov, A. A Study of the Short Fiction. Ronald L. Johnson. Twayne's Studies in Short Fiction 40. New York, NY: Twayne Publishers, 1993. p17-49.http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=GVRL&sw=w&u=lirn17237&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CCX1595500014&sid=classroomWidget&asid=62f32e2d#.XBHgmMiUQh059 wordsRe: IV Discussion AssignmentThe Beggar, by Anton Chekhov.The Summary:The story is about a beggar(Lushkov), asks a Petersburg lawyer(Skvortsov) for money, claiming he's poor and can't get a work. And this lawyer gives him a woodchop job in his place. And here, this beggar's life gets changed by a woman, that feels pity for him and tries to help him by doing his job instead of him. Since then, he gives up drinking and starts to change his life.APA Citation:“How can I get manual work? It’s rather late for me to be a shopman, for in trade one has to begin from a boy; no one would take me as a house porter, because I am not of that class . . . . And I could not get work in a factory; one must know a trade, and I know nothing.” (Chekhov, 1887, p.4).Paraphrase:Come on! The entire loungers discuss this way! Whenever you're given an offer, you do nothing but reject it. Do you mind cutting wood for me? (Chekhov, 1887, p.4).Reference:
Chekhov, A. (1885). The Beggar. New York: Ecco. Retrieved from http://medhum.med.nyu.eduNote:
I have not found anything related to the story in the UoPeople Library.204 wordsRe: IV Discussion AssignmentHello, Monzer!I like your summary and you did a good job with the references!I also had a bit of a hard time finding material in the library related to the story I have read. Have you thought about researching about Chekhov's life, though, to get some information that could have helped you interpret or understand the story you've read?61 wordsRe: IV Discussion AssignmentThe BetI have had a big trouble to find something about the short story that I chose, but finally I found an Essay criticizing. The writer in that Essay, was talking about short stories, properly about “Without Title” but she mentions “The Bet”. In my point of view, s/he were talking about the writer and your short stories, when s/he says something about The Bet, s/he just pointed out the location that she thought she had written that one.In-text citationAccording to Turner, C. J. G. (1993) “is set in an unnamed, "obviously European" city”. (para. 3)ParaphraseThe writer does not now the exactly place where the writer Checkhov was in this short story, because he writes his stories in the city he is set at the moment, “Few writers have so consistently as Chekhvov set their works in their own time and country”. (Turner, 1993)ReferenceChekhov's Story without a Title: Chronotope and GenreCanadian Slavonic Papers 35.3-4 (September-December 1993): p329-334. Rpt. inShort Story Criticism. Ed. Thomas J. Schoenberg and Lawrence J. Trudeau. Vol. 85. Detroit, MI: Gale, 2006. From Literature Resource Center.http://cd20f4dd5.mp03.y.http.go.galegroup.com.proxy.lirn.net/ps/retrieve.do?tabID=T001&resultListType=RESULT_LIST&searchResultsType=SingleTab&searchType=BasicSearchForm¤tPosition=6&docId=GALE%7CH1420067811&docType=Critical+essay&sort=RELEVANCE&contentSegment=&prodId=LitRC&contentSet=GALE%7CH1420067811&searchId=R1&userGroupName=lirn17237&inPS=true240 wordsRe: IV Discussion AssignmentHello guysHow are you ?This week I read 'The Chorus Girl' by Anton chekhov. I read it because of it's idea that facing many families. The story is about a man has a family; a pretty wife and children. But at same time he dates a chorus girl and visite her at her home. His wife had to visit the girl to ask her return back a money that his husband steal it to get presents for her because he will be arrested if she didn't return the money for his work. After his husband listened their conversion, He regret that he made his pretty wife came to such hussy girl.- One quote formatted using APA in-text citation style : “My God! She, a lady, so proud, so pure. . . . She was ready to go down on her knees to . . . to this wench! And I’ve brought her to this! I’ve allowed it!” (Chekhov, 1886, Last Para )
- One paraphrase formatted using APA in-text citation style : Pasha lay down and began wailing aloud. She was already regretting her things which she had given away so impulsively, and her feelings were hurt. She remembered how three years ago a merchant had beaten her for no sort of reason, and she wailed more loudly than ever. (Chekhov, 1886, Last Para )
- Full Reference : (Chekhov. A .1886. 'The Chorus Girl' Location: Oskolki )
- Bodenheim, M. (1917). Chorus Girl. The Soil, 1(4), 162. doi:10.2307/20542323 (I couldn't use the library and also I am not sure that the reference link is right ).
- The story rated with 4 stars on Good readers.
263 wordsRe: IV Discussion AssignmentI chose the text the chorus girl, it is a story that tells about a woman who discovers that her husband betrays her with a beautiful young woman he offers gifts for her while in his wife, he does not give a damn and his children do not have what to eat at home , the same goes to the girl's house to ask for the things that her husband offers her, the young woman swears that her husband gives her nothing but sweet cakes. "Sweet cakes!" Laughed the stranger. "At home the children have nothing to eat, and here you have sweet cakes. Do you absolutely refuse to restore the presents? "Chekhov, Anton. The chorus girl. Originally published, 18 July 1886.121 wordsRe: IV Discussion AssignmentHello, Manuela!I am sorry, I think you missed the instructions for this assignment. If you read the instructor's post at the top of this forum, you were supposed to use the UoPeople Library to research information about the story and then write about what you have found. In your submission, I don't see any information related to that.59 wordsRe: IV Discussion Assignment" I had meant to summon my father only long enough to see what his head looked like, but now he was here and I did not know how to send him back." (Oduor, Okiwiri. My Father's Head. 2013) is how she introduces his award winning short story.
Okwiri Oduor of Nairobi, Kenya, won the 2014 Caine Prize for African Writing for her short story "My Father's Head." She was also invited to literary festivals in Cape Town, South Africa; Nairobi, Kenya; and Abeokuta, Nigeria. The award is annual and is given for a published short story by an African writer.
Isokawa, Dana. "Caine Prize." Poets & Writers Magazine, vol. 43, no. 1, 2015, p. 127.114 wordsRe: IV Discussion AssignmentHello, Renan!Have you read the story? How it does (or does not) what you have found about it concur with your concept of the story?In your submission, it is also not quite clear to me what is your paraphrase, since you did not cite it properly (in-text) as it was the assignment.54 wordsRe: IV Discussion AssignmentOne of the quote from the story named “Beggar” was “Oh, all idlers argue like that! As soon as you are offered anything you refuse it. Would you care to chop wood for me?” (Chekhov,n.d)I like this quote because it emphasizes how much Skvortsov wants to help and encourage the beggar to get a job.This is how what Skvortsov think about beggar in the story……After Skvortsov embarrassed by feeling of guilt for making a man to do labor in freezing weather who went easy on alcoholism and he might also be ill. (Chekhov,n.d, p.29)Chekhov, A. (n.d). The Beggar. Retrieved from http://esl-bits.net/ESL.English.Listening.Short.Stories/Chekhov/The.Beggar/default.html123 words
Re: IV Discussion AssignmentGood nightFor this week, I picked up “The bet”, this story is about a meeting of two lawyers debating which the best option was: the death penalty or life imprisonment. The younger lawyer said he preferred prison for life because he did not want to die, so he makes a bet with the oldest lawyer. If the young lawyer lasts 15 years in captivity he would earn 2 million dollars and the younger lawyer accepted, over the years the young lawyer read many books and little by little read more spiritual books. When the15 years arrived, the old lawyer was worried because he could not pay the 2 million so he went to his cellar with the intention of killing him but before he read his last letter. In this letter the young lawyer tells him that he decided to lose the bet because it was not right to win alone for. After reading that the old lawyer decides to leave the bet. Later, it was also time to free him and he sees that the young lawyer fled and then he lost the bet. That made the old lawyer happy (Checkhov, 2018)When I was researching about this reading, I found an interesting point of view by Tim Heffernan and Graeme Wood. I liked their ideas, especially when they compare Chekov’s ideas with modernity, it said “For Chekhov, the effects of long-term solitary confinement were a matter of speculation. But in the modern American penal system, long-term solitary is an experiment that has been run tens of thousands of times.” (Heffernan, T., & Wood, G., 2015, p33). I believe that their idea concurs with mine because I believe that actual prison system I getting worse and more inhuman.And modern solitary confinement has become a way to take the prisoner´s life away generating them deep depression and anxiety (Heffernan, T., & Wood, G., 2015).CHEKHOV, A. (2018). The Literature Network: Online classic literature, poems, and quotes. Essays & Summaries. Retrieved from http://www.online-literature.com/anton_chekhov/1255/Heffernan, T., & Wood, G. (2015, April 20). The wrong box: our prisons' use of solitary confinement is inhumane. National Review, 67(7), 33. Retrieved from http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A408649499/AONE?u=lirn17237&sid=AONE&xid=ae677292377 wordsWritten Assignment
Your Written Assignment for this unit focuses on creating your own five-paragraph essay. This essay should be based upon the Unit 3 Learning Journal thesis and outline you handed in last week. It is to be an entire work of originality with no outside sources included.This Written Assignment is assessed by your peers and will be for a grade. It will be judged mainly for the following:- Did the student support the thesis?
- Is it a full five-paragraph essay?
- Is it an original work?
- Are there spelling or grammar issues?
- Does the paragraph form a coherent unit?
Please note that you will not necessarily be provided with assessment aspects during assignment submission periods in your other courses.Learning Journal
For this Unit's Learning Journal, you will write a two or three sentence assessment of your own progress and a note to your teacher about your assessment.Kenyan writer Okwiri Oduor was announced this week as the winner of Short Story Day Africa’s “Feast, Famine & Potluck” short story competition with her entry “My Father’s Head”.Want to know why judges Isabella Morris, Consuelo Roland, Novuyo Rosa Tshuma and Petina Gappah chose it as the winner? Read the full story below for your Fiction Friday treat:* * * * * * * * * *My Father’s Head
by Okwiri OduorI had meant to summon my father only long enough to see what his head looked like, but now he was here and I did not know how to send him back.It all started the Thursday that Father Ignatius came from Immaculate Conception in Kitgum. The old women wore their Sunday frocks, and the old men plucked garlands of bougainvillea from the fence and stuck them in their breast pockets. One old man would not leave the dormitory because he could not find his shikwarusi, and when I coaxed and badgered, he patted his hair and said, “My God, do you want the priest from Uganda to think that I look like this every day?”I arranged chairs beneath the avocado tree in the front yard, and the old people sat down and practiced their smiles. A few people who did not live at the home came too, like the woman who hawked candy in the Stagecoach bus to Mathari North, and the man whose one-roomed house was a kindergarten in the daytime and a brothel in the evening, and the woman whose illicit brew had blinded five people in January.Father Ignatius came riding on the back of a bodaboda, and after everyone had dropped a coin in his hat, he gave the bodaboda man fifty shillings and the bodaboda man said, “Praise God,” and then rode back the way he had come.Father Ignatius took off his coat and sat down in the chair that was marked, “Father Ignatius Okello, New Chaplain,” and the old people gave him the smiles they had been practicing, smiles that melted like ghee, that oozed through the corners of their lips and dribbled onto their laps long after the thing that was being smiled about went rancid in the air.Father Ignatius said, “The Lord be with you,” and the people said, “And also with you,” and then they prayed and they sang and they had a feast; dipping bread slices in tea, and when the drops fell on the cuffs of their woollen sweaters, sucking at them with their steamy, cinnamon tongues.Father Ignatius’ maiden sermon was about love: love your neighbour as you love yourself, that kind of self-deprecating thing. The old people had little use for love, and although they gave Father Ignatius an ingratiating smile, what they really wanted to know was what type of place Kitgum was, and if it was true that the Bagisu people were savage cannibals.What I wanted to know was what type of person Father Ignatius thought he was, instructing others to distribute their love like this or like that, as though one could measure love on weights, pack it inside glass jars and place it on shelves for the neighbours to pick as they pleased. As though one could look at it and say, “Now see: I have ten loves in total. Let me save three for my country and give all the rest to my neighbours.”It must have been the way that Father Ignatius filled his mug – until the tea ran over the clay rim and down the stool leg and soaked into his canvas shoe – that got me thinking about my own father. One moment I was listening to tales of Acholi valour, and the next, I was stringing together images of my father, making his limbs move and his lips spew words, so that in the end, he was a marionette and my memories of him were only scenes in a theatrical display.Even as I showed Father Ignatius to his chambers, cleared the table, put the chairs back inside, took my purse, and dragged myself to Odeon to get a matatu to Uthiru, I thought about the millet-coloured freckle in my father’s eye, and the fifty cent coins he always forgot in his coat pockets, and the way each Saturday morning, men knocked on our front door and said things like, “Johnson, you have to come now; the water pipe has burst and we are filling our glasses with shit,” and, “Johnson, there is no time to put on clothes even; just come the way you are. The maid gave birth in the night and flushed the baby down the toilet.”Every day after work, I bought an ear of street-roasted maize and chewed it one kernel at a time, and when I reached the house, I wiggled out of the muslin dress and wore dungarees and drank a cup of masala chai. Then I carried my father’s toolbox to the bathroom. I chiselled out old broken tiles from the wall, and they fell onto my boots, and the dust rose from them and exploded in the flaring tongues of fire lapping through chinks in the stained glass.This time, as I did all those things, I thought of the day I sat at my father’s feet and he scooped a handful of groundnuts and rubbed them between his palms, chewed them, and then fed the mush to me. I was of a curious age then; old enough to chew with my own teeth, yet young enough to desire that hot, masticated love, love that did not need to be doctrinated or measured in cough syrup caps.The Thursday Father Ignatius came from Kitgum, I spent the entire night on my stomach on the sitting room floor, drawing my father. In my mind I could see his face, see the lines around his mouth, the tiny blobs of light in his irises, the crease at the part where his ear joined his temple. I could even see the thick line of sweat and oil on his shirt collar, the little brown veins that broke off from the main stream of dirt and ran down on their own.I could see all these things, yet no matter what I did, his head refused to appear within the borders of the paper. I started off with his feet and worked my way up and in the end my father’s head popped out of the edges of the paper and onto scuffed linoleum and plastic magnolias and the wet soles of bathroom slippers.I showed Bwibo some of the drawings. Bwibo was the cook at the old people’s home, with whom I had formed an easy camaraderie.“My God!” Bwibo muttered, flipping through them. “Simbi, this is abnormal.”The word ‘abnormal’ came out crumbly, and it broke over the sharp edge of the table and became clods of loam on the plastic floor covering. Bwibo rested her head on her palm, and the bell sleeves of her cream-coloured caftan swelled as though there were pumpkins stacked inside them.I told her what I had started to believe, that perhaps my father had had a face but no head at all. And even if my father had had a head, I would not have seen it: people’s heads were not a thing that one often saw. One looked at a person, and what one saw was their face: a regular face-shaped face, that shrouded a regular head-shaped head. If the face was remarkable, one looked twice. But what was there to draw one’s eyes to the banalities of another’s head? Most times when one looked at a person, one did not even see their head there at all.Bwibo stood over the waist-high jiko, poured cassava flour into a pot of bubbling water and stirred it with a cooking oar. “Child,” she said, “how do you know that the man in those drawings is your father? He has no head at all, no face.”“I recognize his clothes. The red corduroys that he always paired with yellow shirts.”Bwibo shook her head. “It is only with a light basket that someone can escape the rain.”It was that time of day when the old people fondled their wooden beads and snorted off to sleep in between incantations. I allowed them a brief, bashful siesta, long enough for them to believe that they had recited the entire rosary. Then I tugged at the ropes and the lunch bells chimed. The old people sat eight to a table, and with their mouths filled with ugali, sour lentils and okra soup, said things like, “Do not buy chapati from Kadima’s Kiosk— Kadima’s wife sits on the dough and charms it with her buttocks,” or, “Did I tell you about Wambua, the one whose cow chewed a child because the child would not stop wailing?”In the afternoon, I emptied the bedpans and soaked the old people’s feet in warm water and baking soda, and when they trooped off to mass I took my purse and went home.
The Christmas before the cane tractor killed my father, he drank his tea from plates and fried his eggs on the lids of coffee jars, and he retrieved his Yamaha drum-set from a shadowy, lizardy place in the back of the house and sat on the veranda and smoked and beat the drums until his knuckles bled.One day he took his stool and hand-held radio and went to the veranda, and I sat at his feet, undid his laces and peeled off his gummy socks. He wiggled his toes about. They smelt slightly fetid, like sour cream.My father smoked and listened to narrations of famine undulating deeper into the Horn of Africa, and when the clock chimed eight o’clock, he turned the knob and listened to the death news. It was not long before his ears caught the name of someone he knew. He choked on the smoke trapped in his throat.My father said, “Did you hear that? Sospeter has gone! Sospeter, the son of Milkah, who taught Agriculture in Mirere Secondary. My God, I am telling you, everyone is going. Even me, you shall hear me on the death news very soon.”I brought him his evening cup of tea. He smashed his cigarette against the veranda, then he slowly brought the cup to his lips. The cup was filled just the way he liked it, filled until the slightest trembling would have his fingers and thighs scalded.My father took a sip of his tea and said, “Sospeter was like a brother to me. Why did I have to learn of his death like this, over the radio?”Later, my father lay on the fold-away sofa, and I sat on the stool watching him, afraid that if I looked away, he would go too. It was the first time I imagined his death, the first time I mourned.
And yet it was not my father I was mourning. I was mourning the image of myself inside the impossible aura of my father’s death. I was imagining what it all would be like: the death news would say that my father had drowned in a cess pit, and people would stare at me as though I were a monitor lizard trapped inside a manhole in the street. I imagined that I would be wearing my green dress when I got the news – the one with red gardenias embroidered in its bodice –and people would come and pat my shoulder and give me warm Coca Cola in plastic cups and say, “I put my sorrow in a basket and brought it here as soon as I heard. How else would your father’s spirit know that me I am innocent of his death?”
Bwibo had an explanation as to why I could not remember the shape of my father’s head.She said, “Although everyone has a head behind their face, some show theirs easily; they turn their back on you and their head is all you can see. Your father was a good man and good men never show you their heads; they show you their faces.”Perhaps she was right. Even the day my father’s people telephoned to say that a cane tractor had flattened him on the road to Shibale, no one said a thing about having seen his head. They described the rest of his body with a measured delicacy: how his legs were strewn across the road, sticky and shiny with fresh tar, and how one foot remained inside his tyre sandal, pounding the pedal of his bicycle, and how cane juice filled his mouth and soaked the collar of his polyester shirt, and how his face had a patient serenity, even as his eyes burst and rolled in the rain puddles.And instead of weeping right away when they said all those things to me, I had wondered if my father really had come from a long line of obawami, and if his people would bury him seated in his grave, with a string of royal cowries round his neck.“In any case,” Bwibo went on, “what more is there to think about your father, eh? That milk spilled a long time ago, and it has curdled on the ground.”I spent the day in the dormitories, stripping beds, sunning mattresses, scrubbing PVC mattress pads. One of the old men kept me company. He told me how he came to spend his sunset years at the home – in August of 1998 he was at the station waiting to board the evening train back home to Mombasa. When the bomb went off at the American Embassy, the police trawled the city and arrested every man of Arab extraction. Because he was seventy-two and already rapidly unravelling into senility, they dumped him at the old people’s home, and he had been there ever since.“Did your people not come to claim you?” I asked, bewildered.The old man snorted. “My people?”“Everyone has people that belong to them.”The old man laughed. “Only the food you have already eaten belongs to you.”Later, the old people sat in drooping clumps in the yard. Bwibo and I watched from the back steps of the kitchen. In the grass, ants devoured a squirming caterpillar. The dog’s nose, a translucent pink doodled with green veins, twitched. Birds raced each other over the frangipani. One tripped over the power line and smashed its head on the moss–covered electricity pole.
Wasps flew low over the grass. A lizard crawled over the lichen that choked a pile of timber. The dog licked the inside of its arm. A troupe of royal butterfly dancers flitted over the row of lilies, their colourful gauze dancing skirts trembling to the rumble of an inaudible drum beat. The dog lay on its side in the grass, smothering the squirming caterpillar and the chewing ants. The dog’s nipples were little pellets of goat shit stuck with spit onto its furry underside.Bwibo said, “I can help you remember the shape of your father’s head.”I said, “Now what type of mud is this you have started speaking?”Bwibo licked her index finger and held it solemnly in the air. “I swear, Bible red! I can help you and I can help you.”
Let me tell you: one day you will renounce your exile, and you will go back home, and your mother will take out the finest china, and your father will slaughter a sprightly cockerel for you, and the neighbours will bring some potluck, and your sister will wear her navy blue P.E wrapper, and your brother will eat with a spoon instead of squelching rice and soup through the spaces between his fingers.And you, you will have to tell them stories about places not-here, about people that soaked their table napkins in Jik Bleach and talked about London as though London was a place one could reach by hopping onto an Akamba bus and driving by Nakuru and Kisumu and Kakamega and finding themselves there.You will tell your people about men that did not slit melons up into slices but split them into halves and ate each of the halves out with a spoon, about women that held each other’s hands around street lamps in town and skipped about, showing snippets of grey Mother’s Union bloomers as they sang:Kijembe ni kikali, param-param
Kilikata mwalimu, param-paramYou think that your people belong to you, that they will always have a place for you in their minds and their hearts. You think that your people will always look forward to your return.
Maybe the day you go back home to your people you will have to sit in a wicker chair on the veranda and smoke alone because, although they may have wanted to have you back, no one really meant for you to stay.My father was slung over the wicker chair in the veranda, just like in the old days, smoking and watching the handheld radio. The death news rose from the radio, and it became a mist, hovering low, clinging to the cold glass of the sitting room window.My father’s shirt flapped in the wind, and tendrils of smoke snapped before his face. He whistled to himself. At first the tune was a faceless, pitiful thing, like an old bottle that someone found on the path and kicked all the way home. Then the tune caught fragments of other tunes inside it, and it lost its free-spirited falling and rising.My father had a head. I could see it now that I had the mind to look for it. His head was shaped like a butternut squash. Perhaps that was the reason I had forgotten all about it; it was a horrible, disconcerting thing to look at.My father had been a plumber. His fingernails were still rimmed with dregs from the drainage pipes he tinkered about in, and his boots still squished with ugali from nondescript kitchen sinks. Watching him, I remembered the day he found a gold chain tangled in the fibres of someone’s excrement, and he wiped the excrement off against his corduroys and sold the chain at Nagin Pattni, and that evening, hoisted high upon his shoulders, he brought home the red Greatwall television. He set it in the corner of the sitting room and said, “Just look how it shines, as though it is not filled with shit inside.”And every day I plucked a bunch of carnations and snipped their stems diagonally and stood them in a glass bowl and placed the glass bowl on top of the television so that my father would not think of shit while he watched the evening news.I said to Bwibo, “We have to send him back.”Bwibo said, “The liver you have asked for is the one you eat.”“But I did not really want him back, I just wanted to see his head.”Bwibo said, “In the end, he came back to you and that should account for something, should it not?”Perhaps my father’s return accounted for nothing but the fact that the house already smelt like him – of burnt lentils and melting fingernails and the bark of bitter quinine and the sourness of wet rags dabbing at broken cigarette tips.I threw things at my father; garlic, incense, salt, pork, and when none of that repelled him, I asked Father Ignatius to bless the house. He brought a vial of holy water, and he sprinkled it in every room, sprinkled it over my father. Father Ignatius said that I would need further protection, but that I would have to write him a cheque first.One day I was buying roast maize in the street corner when the vendor said to me, “Is it true what the vegetable-sellers are saying, that you finally found a man to love you but will not let him through your door?”That evening, I invited my father inside. We sat side by side on the fold-away sofa, and watched as a fly crawled up the dusty screen between the grill and the window glass. It buzzed a little as it climbed. The ceiling fan creaked, and it threw shadows across the corridor floor. The shadows leapt high and mounted doors and peered through the air vents in the walls.The wind upset a cup. For a few seconds, the cup lay lopsided on the windowsill. Then it rolled on its side and scurried across the floor. I pulled at the latch, fastened the window shut. The wind grazed the glass with its wet lips. It left a trail of dust and saliva, and the saliva dribbled down slowly to the edge of the glass. The wind had a slobbery mouth. Soon its saliva had covered the entire window, covered it until the rosemary brushwood outside the window became blurry. The jacaranda outside stooped low, scratched the roof. In the next room, doors and windows banged.
I looked at my father. He was something at once strange and familiar, at once enthralling and frightening – he was the brittle, chipped handle of a ceramic tea mug, and he was the cold yellow stare of an owl.My father touched my hand ever so lightly, so gently, as though afraid that I would flinch and pull my hand away. I did not dare lift my eyes, but he touched my chin and tipped it upwards so that I had no choice but to look at him.I remembered a time when I was a little child, when I stared into my father’s eyes in much the same way. In them I saw shapes; a drunken, talentless conglomerate of circles and triangles and squares. I had wondered how those shapes had got inside my father’s eyes. I had imagined that he sat down at the table, cut out glossy figures from colouring books, slathered them with glue, and stuck them inside his eyes so that they made rummy, haphazard collages in his irises.My father said, “Would you happen to have some tea, Simbi?”I brought some, and he asked if his old friend Pius Obote still came by the house on Saturdays, still brought groundnut soup and pumpkin leaves and a heap of letters that he had picked up from the post office.I said, “Pius Obote has been dead for four years.”My father pushed his cup away. He said, “If you do not want me here drinking your tea, just say so, instead of killing-killing people with your mouth.”My father was silent for a while, grieving this man Pius Obote whose name had always made me think of knees banging against each other. Pius Obote used to blink a lot. Once, he fished inside his pocket for a biro and instead withdrew a chicken bone, still red and moist.My father said to me, “I have seen you. You have offered me tea. I will go now.”“Where will you go?”“I will find a job in a town far from here. Maybe Eldoret. I used to have people there.”I said, “Maybe you could stay here for a couple of days, Baba.”The Bet
I
IT WAS a dark autumn night. The old banker was walking up and down his study and remembering how, fifteen years before, he had given a party one autumn evening. There had been many clever men there, and there had been interesting conversations. Among other things they had talked of capital punishment. The majority of the guests, among whom were many journalists and intellectual men, disapproved of the death penalty. They considered that form of punishment out of date, immoral, and unsuitable for Christian States. In the opinion of some of them the death penalty ought to be replaced everywhere by imprisonment for life.
"I don't agree with you," said their host the banker. "I have not tried either the death penalty or imprisonment for life, but if one may judge � priori, the death penalty is more moral and more humane than imprisonment for life. Capital punishment kills a man at once, but lifelong imprisonment kills him slowly. Which executioner is the more humane, he who kills you in a few minutes or he who drags the life out of you in the course of many years?"
"Both are equally immoral," observed one of the guests, "for they both have the same object -- to take away life. The State is not God. It has not the right to take away what it cannot restore when it wants to."
Among the guests was a young lawyer, a young man of five-and-twenty. When he was asked his opinion, he said:
"The death sentence and the life sentence are equally immoral, but if I had to choose between the death penalty and imprisonment for life, I would certainly choose the second. To live anyhow is better than not at all."
A lively discussion arose. The banker, who was younger and more nervous in those days, was suddenly carried away by excitement; he struck the table with his fist and shouted at the young man:
"It's not true! I'll bet you two millions you wouldn't stay in solitary confinement for five years."
"If you mean that in earnest," said the young man, "I'll take the bet, but I would stay not five but fifteen years."
"Fifteen? Done!" cried the banker. "Gentlemen, I stake two millions!"
"Agreed! You stake your millions and I stake my freedom!" said the young man.
And this wild, senseless bet was carried out! The banker, spoilt and frivolous, with millions beyond his reckoning, was delighted at the bet. At supper he made fun of the young man, and said:
"Think better of it, young man, while there is still time. To me two millions are a trifle, but you are losing three or four of the best years of your life. I say three or four, because you won't stay longer. Don't forget either, you unhappy man, that voluntary confinement is a great deal harder to bear than compulsory. The thought that you have the right to step out in liberty at any moment will poison your whole existence in prison. I am sorry for you."
And now the banker, walking to and fro, remembered all this, and asked himself: "What was the object of that bet? What is the good of that man's losing fifteen years of his life and my throwing away two millions? Can it prove that the death penalty is better or worse than imprisonment for life? No, no. It was all nonsensical and meaningless. On my part it was the caprice of a pampered man, and on his part simple greed for money. . . ."
Then he remembered what followed that evening. It was decided that the young man should spend the years of his captivity under the strictest supervision in one of the lodges in the banker's garden. It was agreed that for fifteen years he should not be free to cross the threshold of the lodge, to see human beings, to hear the human voice, or to receive letters and newspapers. He was allowed to have a musical instrument and books, and was allowed to write letters, to drink wine, and to smoke. By the terms of the agreement, the only relations he could have with the outer world were by a little window made purposely for that object. He might have anything he wanted -- books, music, wine, and so on -- in any quantity he desired by writing an order, but could only receive them through the window. The agreement provided for every detail and every trifle that would make his imprisonment strictly solitary, and bound the young man to stay there exactly fifteen years, beginning from twelve o'clock of November 14, 1870, and ending at twelve o'clock of November 14, 1885. The slightest attempt on his part to break the conditions, if only two minutes before the end, released the banker from the obligation to pay him two millions.
For the first year of his confinement, as far as one could judge from his brief notes, the prisoner suffered severely from loneliness and depression. The sounds of the piano could be heard continually day and night from his lodge. He refused wine and tobacco. Wine, he wrote, excites the desires, and desires are the worst foes of the prisoner; and besides, nothing could be more dreary than drinking good wine and seeing no one. And tobacco spoilt the air of his room. In the first year the books he sent for were principally of a light character; novels with a complicated love plot, sensational and fantastic stories, and so on.
In the second year the piano was silent in the lodge, and the prisoner asked only for the classics. In the fifth year music was audible again, and the prisoner asked for wine. Those who watched him through the window said that all that year he spent doing nothing but eating and drinking and lying on his bed, frequently yawning and angrily talking to himself. He did not read books. Sometimes at night he would sit down to write; he would spend hours writing, and in the morning tear up all that he had written. More than once he could be heard crying.
In the second half of the sixth year the prisoner began zealously studying languages, philosophy, and history. He threw himself eagerly into these studies -- so much so that the banker had enough to do to get him the books he ordered. In the course of four years some six hundred volumes were procured at his request. It was during this period that the banker received the following letter from his prisoner:
"My dear Jailer, I write you these lines in six languages. Show them to people who know the languages. Let them read them. If they find not one mistake I implore you to fire a shot in the garden. That shot will show me that my efforts have not been thrown away. The geniuses of all ages and of all lands speak different languages, but the same flame burns in them all. Oh, if you only knew what unearthly happiness my soul feels now from being able to understand them!" The prisoner's desire was fulfilled. The banker ordered two shots to be fired in the garden.
Then after the tenth year, the prisoner sat immovably at the table and read nothing but the Gospel. It seemed strange to the banker that a man who in four years had mastered six hundred learned volumes should waste nearly a year over one thin book easy of comprehension. Theology and histories of religion followed the Gospels.
In the last two years of his confinement the prisoner read an immense quantity of books quite indiscriminately. At one time he was busy with the natural sciences, then he would ask for Byron or Shakespeare. There were notes in which he demanded at the same time books on chemistry, and a manual of medicine, and a novel, and some treatise on philosophy or theology. His reading suggested a man swimming in the sea among the wreckage of his ship, and trying to save his life by greedily clutching first at one spar and then at another.
II
The old banker remembered all this, and thought:
"To-morrow at twelve o'clock he will regain his freedom. By our agreement I ought to pay him two millions. If I do pay him, it is all over with me: I shall be utterly ruined."
Fifteen years before, his millions had been beyond his reckoning; now he was afraid to ask himself which were greater, his debts or his assets. Desperate gambling on the Stock Exchange, wild speculation and the excitability which he could not get over even in advancing years, had by degrees led to the decline of his fortune and the proud, fearless, self-confident millionaire had become a banker of middling rank, trembling at every rise and fall in his investments. "Cursed bet!" muttered the old man, clutching his head in despair "Why didn't the man die? He is only forty now. He will take my last penny from me, he will marry, will enjoy life, will gamble on the Exchange; while I shall look at him with envy like a beggar, and hear from him every day the same sentence: 'I am indebted to you for the happiness of my life, let me help you!' No, it is too much! The one means of being saved from bankruptcy and disgrace is the death of that man!"
It struck three o'clock, the banker listened; everyone was asleep in the house and nothing could be heard outside but the rustling of the chilled trees. Trying to make no noise, he took from a fireproof safe the key of the door which had not been opened for fifteen years, put on his overcoat, and went out of the house.
It was dark and cold in the garden. Rain was falling. A damp cutting wind was racing about the garden, howling and giving the trees no rest. The banker strained his eyes, but could see neither the earth nor the white statues, nor the lodge, nor the trees. Going to the spot where the lodge stood, he twice called the watchman. No answer followed. Evidently the watchman had sought shelter from the weather, and was now asleep somewhere either in the kitchen or in the greenhouse.
"If I had the pluck to carry out my intention," thought the old man, "Suspicion would fall first upon the watchman."
He felt in the darkness for the steps and the door, and went into the entry of the lodge. Then he groped his way into a little passage and lighted a match. There was not a soul there. There was a bedstead with no bedding on it, and in the corner there was a dark cast-iron stove. The seals on the door leading to the prisoner's rooms were intact.
When the match went out the old man, trembling with emotion, peeped through the little window. A candle was burning dimly in the prisoner's room. He was sitting at the table. Nothing could be seen but his back, the hair on his head, and his hands. Open books were lying on the table, on the two easy-chairs, and on the carpet near the table.
Five minutes passed and the prisoner did not once stir. Fifteen years' imprisonment had taught him to sit still. The banker tapped at the window with his finger, and the prisoner made no movement whatever in response. Then the banker cautiously broke the seals off the door and put the key in the keyhole. The rusty lock gave a grating sound and the door creaked. The banker expected to hear at once footsteps and a cry of astonishment, but three minutes passed and it was as quiet as ever in the room. He made up his mind to go in.
At the table a man unlike ordinary people was sitting motionless. He was a skeleton with the skin drawn tight over his bones, with long curls like a woman's and a shaggy beard. His face was yellow with an earthy tint in it, his cheeks were hollow, his back long and narrow, and the hand on which his shaggy head was propped was so thin and delicate that it was dreadful to look at it. His hair was already streaked with silver, and seeing his emaciated, aged-looking face, no one would have believed that he was only forty. He was asleep. . . . In front of his bowed head there lay on the table a sheet of paper on which there was something written in fine handwriting.
"Poor creature!" thought the banker, "he is asleep and most likely dreaming of the millions. And I have only to take this half-dead man, throw him on the bed, stifle him a little with the pillow, and the most conscientious expert would find no sign of a violent death. But let us first read what he has written here. . . ."
The banker took the page from the table and read as follows:
"To-morrow at twelve o'clock I regain my freedom and the right to associate with other men, but before I leave this room and see the sunshine, I think it necessary to say a few words to you. With a clear conscience I tell you, as before God, who beholds me, that I despise freedom and life and health, and all that in your books is called the good things of the world.
"For fifteen years I have been intently studying earthly life. It is true I have not seen the earth nor men, but in your books I have drunk fragrant wine, I have sung songs, I have hunted stags and wild boars in the forests, have loved women. . . . Beauties as ethereal as clouds, created by the magic of your poets and geniuses, have visited me at night, and have whispered in my ears wonderful tales that have set my brain in a whirl. In your books I have climbed to the peaks of Elburz and Mont Blanc, and from there I have seen the sun rise and have watched it at evening flood the sky, the ocean, and the mountain-tops with gold and crimson. I have watched from there the lightning flashing over my head and cleaving the storm-clouds. I have seen green forests, fields, rivers, lakes, towns. I have heard the singing of the sirens, and the strains of the shepherds' pipes; I have touched the wings of comely devils who flew down to converse with me of God. . . . In your books I have flung myself into the bottomless pit, performed miracles, slain, burned towns, preached new religions, conquered whole kingdoms. . . .
"Your books have given me wisdom. All that the unresting thought of man has created in the ages is compressed into a small compass in my brain. I know that I am wiser than all of you.
"And I despise your books, I despise wisdom and the blessings of this world. It is all worthless, fleeting, illusory, and deceptive, like a mirage. You may be proud, wise, and fine, but death will wipe you off the face of the earth as though you were no more than mice burrowing under the floor, and your posterity, your history, your immortal geniuses will burn or freeze together with the earthly globe.
"You have lost your reason and taken the wrong path. You have taken lies for truth, and hideousness for beauty. You would marvel if, owing to strange events of some sorts, frogs and lizards suddenly grew on apple and orange trees instead of fruit, or if roses began to smell like a sweating horse; so I marvel at you who exchange heaven for earth. I don't want to understand you.
"To prove to you in action how I despise all that you live by, I renounce the two millions of which I once dreamed as of paradise and which now I despise. To deprive myself of the right to the money I shall go out from here five hours before the time fixed, and so break the compact. . . ."
When the banker had read this he laid the page on the table, kissed the strange man on the head, and went out of the lodge, weeping. At no other time, even when he had lost heavily on the Stock Exchange, had he felt so great a contempt for himself. When he got home he lay on his bed, but his tears and emotion kept him for hours from sleeping.
Next morning the watchmen ran in with pale faces, and told him they had seen the man who lived in the lodge climb out of the window into the garden, go to the gate, and disappear. The banker went at once with the servants to the lodge and made sure of the flight of his prisoner. To avoid arousing unnecessary talk, he took from the table the writing in which the millions were renounced, and when he got home locked it up in the fireproof safe.Hush!by Anton Chekhov
IVAN YEGORITCH KRASNYHIN, a fourth-rate journalist, returns home late at night, grave and careworn, with a peculiar air of concentration. He looks like a man expecting a police-raid or contemplating suicide. Pacing about his rooms he halts abruptly, ruffles up his hair, and says in the tone in which Laertes announces his intention of avenging his sister:“Shattered, soul-weary, a sick load of misery on the heart . . . and then to sit down and write. And this is called life! How is it nobody has described the agonizing discord in the soul of a writer who has to amuse the crowd when his heart is heavy or to shed tears at the word of command when his heart is light? I must be playful, coldly unconcerned, witty, but what if I am weighed down with misery, what if I am ill, or my child is dying or my wife in anguish!”He says this, brandishing his fists and rolling his eyes. . . . Then he goes into the bedroom and wakes his wife.“Nadya,” he says, “I am sitting down to write. . . . Please don’t let anyone interrupt me. I can’t write with children crying or cooks snoring. . . . See, too, that there’s tea and . . . steak or something. . . . You know that I can’t write without tea. . . . Tea is the one thing that gives me the energy for my work.”Returning to his room he takes off his coat, waistcoat, and boots. He does this very slowly; then, assuming an expression of injured innocence, he sits down to his table.There is nothing casual, nothing ordinary on his writing-table, down to the veriest trifle everything bears the stamp of a stern, deliberately planned programme. Little busts and photographs of distinguished writers, heaps of rough manuscripts, a volume of Byelinsky with a page turned down, part of a skull by way of an ash-tray, a sheet of newspaper folded carelessly, but so that a passage is uppermost, boldly marked in blue pencil with the word “disgraceful.” There are a dozen sharply-pointed pencils and several penholders fitted with new nibs, put in readiness that no accidental breaking of a pen may for a single second interrupt the flight of his creative fancy.Ivan Yegoritch throws himself back in his chair, and closing his eyes concentrates himself on his subject. He hears his wife shuffling about in her slippers and splitting shavings to heat the samovar. She is hardly awake, that is apparent from the way the knife and the lid of the samovar keep dropping from her hands. Soon the hissing of the samovar and the spluttering of the frying meat reaches him. His wife is still splitting shavings and rattling with the doors and blowers of the stove.All at once Ivan Yegoritch starts, opens frightened eyes, and begins to sniff the air.“Heavens! the stove is smoking!” he groans, grimacing with a face of agony. “Smoking! That insufferable woman makes a point of trying to poison me! How, in God’s Name, am I to write in such surroundings, kindly tell me that?”He rushes into the kitchen and breaks into a theatrical wail. When a little later, his wife, stepping cautiously on tiptoe, brings him in a glass of tea, he is sitting in an easy chair as before with his eyes closed, absorbed in his article. He does not stir, drums lightly on his forehead with two fingers, and pretends he is not aware of his wife’s presence. . . . His face wears an expression of injured innocence.Like a girl who has been presented with a costly fan, he spends a long time coquetting, grimacing, and posing to himself before he writes the title. . . . He presses his temples, he wriggles, and draws his legs up under his chair as though he were in pain, or half closes his eyes languidly like a cat on the sofa. At last, not without hesitation, he stretches out his hand towards the inkstand, and with an expression as though he were signing a death-warrant, writes the title. . . .“Mammy, give me some water!” he hears his son’s voice.“Hush!” says his mother. “Daddy’s writing! Hush!”Daddy writes very, very quickly, without corrections or pauses, he has scarcely time to turn over the pages. The busts and portraits of celebrated authors look at his swiftly racing pen and, keeping stock still, seem to be thinking: “Oh my, how you are going it!”“Sh!” squeaks the pen.“Sh!” whisper the authors, when his knee jolts the table and they are set trembling.All at once Krasnyhin draws himself up, lays down his pen and listens. . . . He hears an even monotonous whispering. . . . It is Foma Nikolaevitch, the lodger in the next room, saying his prayers.“I say!” cries Krasnyhin. “Couldn’t you, please, say your prayers more quietly? You prevent me from writing!”“Very sorry. . . . ” Foma Nikolaevitch answers timidly.After covering five pages, Krasnyhin stretches and looks at his watch.“Goodness, three o’clock already,” he moans. “Other people are asleep while I . . . I alone must work!”Shattered and exhausted he goes, with his head on one side, to the bedroom to wake his wife, and says in a languid voice:“Nadya, get me some more tea! I . . . feel weak.”He writes till four o’clock and would readily have written till six if his subject had not been exhausted. Coquetting and posing to himself and the inanimate objects about him, far from any indiscreet, critical eye, tyrannizing and domineering over the little anthill that fate has put in his power are the honey and the salt of his existence. And how different is this despot here at home from the humble, meek, dull-witted little man we are accustomed to see in the editor’s offices!“I am so exhausted that I am afraid I shan’t sleep . . . ” he says as he gets into bed. “Our work, this cursed, ungrateful hard labour, exhausts the soul even more than the body. . . . I had better take some bromide. . . . God knows, if it were not for my family I’d throw up the work. . . . To write to order! It is awful.”He sleeps till twelve or one o’clock in the day, sleeps a sound, healthy sleep. . . . Ah! how he would sleep, what dreams he would have, how he would spread himself if he were to become a well-known writer, an editor, or even a sub-editor!“He has been writing all night,” whispers his wife with a scared expression on her face. “Sh!”No one dares to speak or move or make a sound. His sleep is something sacred, and the culprit who offends against it will pay dearly for his fault.“Hush!” floats over the flat. “Hush!”The Chorus Girlby Anton Chekhov
ONE day when she was younger and better-looking, and when her voice was stronger, Nikolay Petrovitch Kolpakov, her adorer, was sitting in the outer room in her summer villa. It was intolerably hot and stifling. Kolpakov, who had just dined and drunk a whole bottle of inferior port, felt ill-humoured and out of sorts. Both were bored and waiting for the heat of the day to be over in order to go for a walk.All at once there was a sudden ring at the door. Kolpakov, who was sitting with his coat off, in his slippers, jumped up and looked inquiringly at Pasha.“It must be the postman or one of the girls,” said the singer.Kolpakov did not mind being found by the postman or Pasha’s lady friends, but by way of precaution gathered up his clothes and went into the next room, while Pasha ran to open the door. To her great surprise in the doorway stood, not the postman and not a girl friend, but an unknown woman, young and beautiful, who was dressed like a lady, and from all outward signs was one.The stranger was pale and was breathing heavily as though she had been running up a steep flight of stairs.“What is it?” asked Pasha.The lady did not at once answer. She took a step forward, slowly looked about the room, and sat down in a way that suggested that from fatigue, or perhaps illness, she could not stand; then for a long time her pale lips quivered as she tried in vain to speak.“Is my husband here?” she asked at last, raising to Pasha her big eyes with their red tear-stained lids.“Husband?” whispered Pasha, and was suddenly so frightened that her hands and feet turned cold. “What husband?” she repeated, beginning to tremble.“My husband, . . . Nikolay Petrovitch Kolpakov.”“N . . . no, madam. . . . I . . . I don’t know any husband.”A minute passed in silence. The stranger several times passed her handkerchief over her pale lips and held her breath to stop her inward trembling, while Pasha stood before her motionless, like a post, and looked at her with astonishment and terror.“So you say he is not here?” the lady asked, this time speaking with a firm voice and smiling oddly.“I . . . I don’t know who it is you are asking about.”“You are horrid, mean, vile . . .” the stranger muttered, scanning Pasha with hatred and repulsion. “Yes, yes . . . you are horrid. I am very, very glad that at last I can tell you so!”Pasha felt that on this lady in black with the angry eyes and white slender fingers she produced the impression of something horrid and unseemly, and she felt ashamed of her chubby red cheeks, the pock-mark on her nose, and the fringe on her forehead, which never could be combed back. And it seemed to her that if she had been thin, and had had no powder on her face and no fringe on her forehead, then she could have disguised the fact that she was not “respectable,” and she would not have felt so frightened and ashamed to stand facing this unknown, mysterious lady.“Where is my husband?” the lady went on. “Though I don’t care whether he is here or not, but I ought to tell you that the money has been missed, and they are looking for Nikolay Petrovitch. . . . They mean to arrest him. That’s your doing!”The lady got up and walked about the room in great excitement. Pasha looked at her and was so frightened that she could not understand.“He’ll be found and arrested today,” said the lady, and she gave a sob, and in that sound could be heard her resentment and vexation. “I know who has brought him to this awful position! Low, horrid creature! Loathsome, mercenary hussy!” The lady’s lips worked and her nose wrinkled up with disgust. “I am helpless, do you hear, you low woman? . . . I am helpless; you are stronger than I am, but there is One to defend me and my children! God sees all! He is just! He will punish you for every tear I have shed, for all my sleepless nights! The time will come; you will think of me! . . .”Silence followed again. The lady walked about the room and wrung her hands, while Pasha still gazed blankly at her in amazement, not understanding and expecting something terrible.“I know nothing about it, madam,” she said, and suddenly burst into tears.“You are lying!” cried the lady, and her eyes flashed angrily at her. “I know all about it! I’ve known you a long time. I know that for the last month he has been spending every day with you!”“Yes. What then? What of it? I have a great many visitors, but I don’t force anyone to come. He is free to do as he likes.”“I tell you they have discovered that money is missing! He has embezzled money at the office! For the sake of such a . . . creature as you, for your sake he has actually committed a crime. Listen,” said the lady in a resolute voice, stopping short, facing Pasha. “You can have no principles; you live simply to do harm — that’s your object; but one can’t imagine you have fallen so low that you have no trace of human feeling left! He has a wife, children. . . . If he is condemned and sent into exile we shall starve, the children and I. . . . Understand that! And yet there is a chance of saving him and us from destitution and disgrace. If I take them nine hundred roubles today they will let him alone. Only nine hundred roubles!”“What nine hundred roubles?” Pasha asked softly. “I . . . I don’t know. . . . I haven’t taken it.”“I am not asking you for nine hundred roubles. . . . You have no money, and I don’t want your money. I ask you for something else. . . . Men usually give expensive things to women like you. Only give me back the things my husband has given you!”“Madam, he has never made me a present of anything!” Pasha wailed, beginning to understand.“Where is the money? He has squandered his own and mine and other people’s. . . . What has become of it all? Listen, I beg you! I was carried away by indignation and have said a lot of nasty things to you, but I apologize. You must hate me, I know, but if you are capable of sympathy, put yourself in my position! I implore you to give me back the things!”“H’m!” said Pasha, and she shrugged her shoulders. “I would with pleasure, but God is my witness, he never made me a present of anything. Believe me, on my conscience. However, you are right, though,” said the singer in confusion, “he did bring me two little things. Certainly I will give them back, if you wish it.”Pasha pulled out one of the drawers in the toilet-table and took out of it a hollow gold bracelet and a thin ring with a ruby in it.“Here, madam!” she said, handing the visitor these articles.The lady flushed and her face quivered. She was offended.“What are you giving me?” she said. “I am not asking for charity, but for what does not belong to you . . . what you have taken advantage of your position to squeeze out of my husband . . . that weak, unhappy man. . . . On Thursday, when I saw you with my husband at the harbour you were wearing expensive brooches and bracelets. So it’s no use your playing the innocent lamb to me! I ask you for the last time: will you give me the things, or not?”“You are a queer one, upon my word,” said Pasha, beginning to feel offended. “I assure you that, except the bracelet and this little ring, I’ve never seen a thing from your Nikolay Petrovitch. He brings me nothing but sweet cakes.”“Sweet cakes!” laughed the stranger. “At home the children have nothing to eat, and here you have sweet cakes. You absolutely refuse to restore the presents?”Receiving no answer, the lady sat, down and stared into space, pondering.“What’s to be done now?” she said. “If I don’t get nine hundred roubles, he is ruined, and the children and I am ruined, too. Shall I kill this low woman or go down on my knees to her?”The lady pressed her handkerchief to her face and broke into sobs.“I beg you!” Pasha heard through the stranger’s sobs. “You see you have plundered and ruined my husband. Save him. . . . You have no feeling for him, but the children . . . the children . . . What have the children done?”Pasha imagined little children standing in the street, crying with hunger, and she, too, sobbed.“What can I do, madam?” she said. “You say that I am a low woman and that I have ruined Nikolay Petrovitch, and I assure you . . . before God Almighty, I have had nothing from him whatever. . . . There is only one girl in our chorus who has a rich admirer; all the rest of us live from hand to mouth on bread and kvass. Nikolay Petrovitch is a highly educated, refined gentleman, so I’ve made him welcome. We are bound to make gentlemen welcome.”“I ask you for the things! Give me the things! I am crying. . . . I am humiliating myself. . . . If you like I will go down on my knees! If you wish it!”Pasha shrieked with horror and waved her hands. She felt that this pale, beautiful lady who expressed herself so grandly, as though she were on the stage, really might go down on her knees to her, simply from pride, from grandeur, to exalt herself and humiliate the chorus girl.“Very well, I will give you things!” said Pasha, wiping her eyes and bustling about. “By all means. Only they are not from Nikolay Petrovitch. . . . I got these from other gentlemen. As you please . . . .”Pasha pulled out the upper drawer of the chest, took out a diamond brooch, a coral necklace, some rings and bracelets, and gave them all to the lady.“Take them if you like, only I’ve never had anything from your husband. Take them and grow rich,” Pasha went on, offended at the threat to go down on her knees. “And if you are a lady . . . his lawful wife, you should keep him to yourself. I should think so! I did not ask him to come; he came of himself.”Through her tears the lady scrutinized the articles given her and said:“This isn’t everything. . . . There won’t be five hundred roubles’ worth here.”Pasha impulsively flung out of the chest a gold watch, a cigar-case and studs, and said, flinging up her hands:“I’ve nothing else left. . . . You can search!”The visitor gave a sigh, with trembling hands twisted the things up in her handkerchief, and went out without uttering a word, without even nodding her head.The door from the next room opened and Kolpakov walked in. He was pale and kept shaking his head nervously, as though he had swallowed something very bitter; tears were glistening in his eyes.“What presents did you make me?” Pasha asked, pouncing upon him. “When did you, allow me to ask you?”“Presents . . . that’s no matter!” said Kolpakov, and he tossed his head. “My God! She cried before you, she humbled herself . . . .”“I am asking you, what presents did you make me?” Pasha cried.“My God! She, a lady, so proud, so pure. . . . She was ready to go down on her knees to . . . to this wench! And I’ve brought her to this! I’ve allowed it!”He clutched his head in his hands and moaned.“No, I shall never forgive myself for this! I shall never forgive myself! Get away from me . . . you low creature!” he cried with repulsion, backing away from Pasha, and thrusting her off with trembling hands. “She would have gone down on her knees, and . . . and to you! Oh, my God!”He rapidly dressed, and pushing Pasha aside contemptuously, made for the door and went out.Pasha lay down and began wailing aloud. She was already regretting her things which she had given away so impulsively, and her feelings were hurt. She remembered how three years ago a merchant had beaten her for no sort of reason, and she wailed more loudly than ever.The Beggarby Anton Chekhov
KIND sir, be so good as to notice a poor, hungry man. I have not tasted food for three days. I have not a five-kopeck piece for a night’s lodging. I swear by God! For five years I was a village schoolmaster and lost my post through the intrigues of the Zemstvo. I was the victim of false witness. I have been out of a place for a year now.”Skvortsov, a Petersburg lawyer, looked at the speaker’s tattered dark blue overcoat, at his muddy, drunken eyes, at the red patches on his cheeks, and it seemed to him that he had seen the man before.“And now I am offered a post in the Kaluga province,” the beggar continued, “but I have not the means for the journey there. Graciously help me! I am ashamed to ask, but . . . I am compelled by circumstances.”Skvortsov looked at his goloshes, of which one was shallow like a shoe, while the other came high up the leg like a boot, and suddenly remembered.“Listen, the day before yesterday I met you in Sadovoy Street,” he said, “and then you told me, not that you were a village schoolmaster, but that you were a student who had been expelled. Do you remember?”“N-o. No, that cannot be so!” the beggar muttered in confusion. “I am a village schoolmaster, and if you wish it I can show you documents to prove it.”“That’s enough lies! You called yourself a student, and even told me what you were expelled for. Do you remember?”Skvortsov flushed, and with a look of disgust on his face turned away from the ragged figure.“It’s contemptible, sir!” he cried angrily. “It’s a swindle! I’ll hand you over to the police, damn you! You are poor and hungry, but that does not give you the right to lie so shamelessly!”The ragged figure took hold of the door-handle and, like a bird in a snare, looked round the hall desperately.“I . . . I am not lying,” he muttered. “I can show documents.”“Who can believe you?” Skvortsov went on, still indignant. “To exploit the sympathy of the public for village schoolmasters and students — it’s so low, so mean, so dirty! It’s revolting!”Skvortsov flew into a rage and gave the beggar a merciless scolding. The ragged fellow’s insolent lying aroused his disgust and aversion, was an offence against what he, Skvortsov, loved and prized in himself: kindliness, a feeling heart, sympathy for the unhappy. By his lying, by his treacherous assault upon compassion, the individual had, as it were, defiled the charity which he liked to give to the poor with no misgivings in his heart. The beggar at first defended himself, protested with oaths, then he sank into silence and hung his head, overcome with shame.“Sir!” he said, laying his hand on his heart, “I really was . . . lying! I am not a student and not a village schoolmaster. All that’s mere invention! I used to be in the Russian choir, and I was turned out of it for drunkenness. But what can I do? Believe me, in God’s name, I can’t get on without lying — when I tell the truth no one will give me anything. With the truth one may die of hunger and freeze without a night’s lodging! What you say is true, I understand that, but . . . what am I to do?”“What are you to do? You ask what are you to do?” cried Skvortsov, going close up to him. “Work — that’s what you must do! You must work!”“Work. . . . I know that myself, but where can I get work?”“Nonsense. You are young, strong, and healthy, and could always find work if you wanted to. But you know you are lazy, pampered, drunken! You reek of vodka like a pothouse! You have become false and corrupt to the marrow of your bones and fit for nothing but begging and lying! If you do graciously condescend to take work, you must have a job in an office, in the Russian choir, or as a billiard-marker, where you will have a salary and have nothing to do! But how would you like to undertake manual labour? I’ll be bound, you wouldn’t be a house porter or a factory hand! You are too genteel for that!”“What things you say, really . . .” said the beggar, and he gave a bitter smile. “How can I get manual work? It’s rather late for me to be a shopman, for in trade one has to begin from a boy; no one would take me as a house porter, because I am not of that class . . . . And I could not get work in a factory; one must know a trade, and I know nothing.”“Nonsense! You always find some justification! Wouldn’t you like to chop wood?”“I would not refuse to, but the regular woodchoppers are out of work now.”“Oh, all idlers argue like that! As soon as you are offered anything you refuse it. Would you care to chop wood for me?”“Certainly I will. . .”“Very good, we shall see. . . . Excellent. We’ll see!” Skvortsov, in nervous haste; and not without malignant pleasure, rubbing his hands, summoned his cook from the kitchen.“Here, Olga,” he said to her, “take this gentleman to the shed and let him chop some wood.”The beggar shrugged his shoulders as though puzzled, and irresolutely followed the cook. It was evident from his demeanour that he had consented to go and chop wood, not because he was hungry and wanted to earn money, but simply from shame and amour propre, because he had been taken at his word. It was clear, too, that he was suffering from the effects of vodka, that he was unwell, and felt not the faintest inclination to work.Skvortsov hurried into the dining-room. There from the window which looked out into the yard he could see the woodshed and everything that happened in the yard. Standing at the window, Skvortsov saw the cook and the beggar come by the back way into the yard and go through the muddy snow to the woodshed. Olga scrutinized her companion angrily, and jerking her elbow unlocked the woodshed and angrily banged the door open.“Most likely we interrupted the woman drinking her coffee,” thought Skvortsov. “What a cross creature she is!”Then he saw the pseudo-schoolmaster and pseudo-student seat himself on a block of wood, and, leaning his red cheeks upon his fists, sink into thought. The cook flung an axe at his feet, spat angrily on the ground, and, judging by the expression of her lips, began abusing him. The beggar drew a log of wood towards him irresolutely, set it up between his feet, and diffidently drew the axe across it. The log toppled and fell over. The beggar drew it towards him, breathed on his frozen hands, and again drew the axe along it as cautiously as though he were afraid of its hitting his golosh or chopping off his fingers. The log fell over again.Skvortsov’s wrath had passed off by now, he felt sore and ashamed at the thought that he had forced a pampered, drunken, and perhaps sick man to do hard, rough work in the cold.“Never mind, let him go on . . .” he thought, going from the dining-room into his study. “I am doing it for his good!”An hour later Olga appeared and announced that the wood had been chopped up.“Here, give him half a rouble,” said Skvortsov. “If he likes, let him come and chop wood on the first of every month. . . . There will always be work for him.”On the first of the month the beggar turned up and again earned half a rouble, though he could hardly stand. From that time forward he took to turning up frequently, and work was always found for him: sometimes he would sweep the snow into heaps, or clear up the shed, at another he used to beat the rugs and the mattresses. He always received thirty to forty kopecks for his work, and on one occasion an old pair of trousers was sent out to him.When he moved, Skvortsov engaged him to assist in packing and moving the furniture. On this occasion the beggar was sober, gloomy, and silent; he scarcely touched the furniture, walked with hanging head behind the furniture vans, and did not even try to appear busy; he merely shivered with the cold, and was overcome with confusion when the men with the vans laughed at his idleness, feebleness, and ragged coat that had once been a gentleman’s. After the removal Skvortsov sent for him.“Well, I see my words have had an effect upon you,” he said, giving him a rouble. “This is for your work. I see that you are sober and not disinclined to work. What is your name?”“Lushkov.”“I can offer you better work, not so rough, Lushkov. Can you write?”“Yes, sir.”“Then go with this note tomorrow to my colleague and he will give you some copying to do. Work, don’t drink, and don’t forget what I said to you. Good-bye.”Skvortsov, pleased that he had put a man in the path of rectitude, patted Lushkov genially on the shoulder, and even shook hands with him at parting.Lushkov took the letter, departed, and from that time forward did not come to the back-yard for work.Two years passed. One day as Skvortsov was standing at the ticket-office of a theatre, paying for his ticket, he saw beside him a little man with a lambskin collar and a shabby cat’s-skin cap. The man timidly asked the clerk for a gallery ticket and paid for it with kopecks.“Lushkov, is it you?” asked Skvortsov, recognizing in the little man his former woodchopper. “Well, what are you doing? Are you getting on all right?”“Pretty well. . . . I am in a notary’s office now. I earn thirty-five roubles.”“Well, thank God, that’s capital. I rejoice for you. I am very, very glad, Lushkov. You know, in a way, you are my godson. It was I who shoved you into the right way. Do you remember what a scolding I gave you, eh? You almost sank through the floor that time. Well, thank you, my dear fellow, for remembering my words.”“Thank you too,” said Lushkov. “If I had not come to you that day, maybe I should be calling myself a schoolmaster or a student still. Yes, in your house I was saved, and climbed out of the pit.”“I am very, very glad.”“Thank you for your kind words and deeds. What you said that day was excellent. I am grateful to you and to your cook, God bless that kind, noble-hearted woman. What you said that day was excellent; I am indebted to you as long as I live, of course, but it was your cook, Olga, who really saved me.”“How was that?”“Why, it was like this. I used to come to you to chop wood and she would begin: ‘Ah, you drunkard! You God-forsaken man! And yet death does not take you!’ and then she would sit opposite me, lamenting, looking into my face and wailing: ‘You unlucky fellow! You have no gladness in this world, and in the next you will burn in hell, poor drunkard! You poor sorrowful creature!’ and she always went on in that style, you know. How often she upset herself, and how many tears she shed over me I can’t tell you. But what affected me most — she chopped the wood for me! Do you know, sir, I never chopped a single log for you — she did it all! How it was she saved me, how it was I changed, looking at her, and gave up drinking, I can’t explain. I only know that what she said and the noble way she behaved brought about a change in my soul, and I shall never forget it. It’s time to go up, though, they are just going to ring the bell.”Lushkov bowed and went off to the gallery.The Trousseauby Anton Chekhov
I HAVE seen a great many houses in my time, little and big, new and old, built of stone and of wood, but of one house I have kept a very vivid memory. It was, properly speaking, rather a cottage than a house — a tiny cottage of one story, with three windows, looking extraordinarily like a little old hunchback woman with a cap on. Its white stucco walls, its tiled roof, and dilapidated chimney, were all drowned in a perfect sea of green. The cottage was lost to sight among the mulberry-trees, acacias, and poplars planted by the grandfathers and great-grandfathers of its present occupants. And yet it is a town house. Its wide courtyard stands in a row with other similar green courtyards, and forms part of a street. Nothing ever drives down that street, and very few persons are ever seen walking through it.The shutters of the little house are always closed; its occupants do not care for sunlight — the light is no use to them. The windows are never opened, for they are not fond of fresh air. People who spend their lives in the midst of acacias, mulberries, and nettles have no passion for nature. It is only to the summer visitor that God has vouchsafed an eye for the beauties of nature. The rest of mankind remain steeped in profound ignorance of the existence of such beauties. People never prize what they have always had in abundance. “What we have, we do not treasure,” and what’s more we do not even love it.The little house stands in an earthly paradise of green trees with happy birds nesting in them. But inside . . . alas . . .! In summer, it is close and stifling within; in winter, hot as a Turkish bath, not one breath of air, and the dreariness! . . .The first time I visited the little house was many years ago on business. I brought a message from the Colonel who was the owner of the house to his wife and daughter. That first visit I remember very distinctly. It would be impossible, indeed, to forget it.Imagine a limp little woman of forty, gazing at you with alarm and astonishment while you walk from the passage into the parlour. You are a stranger, a visitor, “a young man”; that’s enough to reduce her to a state of terror and bewilderment. Though you have no dagger, axe, or revolver in your hand, and though you smile affably, you are met with alarm.“Whom have I the honour and pleasure of addressing?” the little lady asks in a trembling voice.I introduced myself and explained why I had come. The alarm and amazement were at once succeeded by a shrill, joyful “Ach!” and she turned her eyes upwards to the ceiling. This “Ach!” was caught up like an echo and repeated from the hall to the parlour, from the parlour to the kitchen, and so on down to the cellar. Soon the whole house was resounding with “Ach!” in various voices.Five minutes later I was sitting on a big, soft, warm lounge in the drawing-room listening to the “Ach!” echoing all down the street. There was a smell of moth powder, and of goatskin shoes, a pair of which lay on a chair beside me wrapped in a handkerchief. In the windows were geraniums, and muslin curtains, and on the curtains were torpid flies. On the wall hung the portrait of some bishop, painted in oils, with the glass broken at one corner, and next to the bishop a row of ancestors with lemon-coloured faces of a gipsy type. On the table lay a thimble, a reel of cotton, and a half-knitted stocking, and paper patterns and a black blouse, tacked together, were lying on the floor. In the next room two alarmed and fluttered old women were hurriedly picking up similar patterns and pieces of tailor’s chalk from the floor.“You must, please, excuse us; we are dreadfully untidy,” said the little lady.While she talked to me, she stole embarrassed glances towards the other room where the patterns were still being picked up. The door, too, seemed embarrassed, opening an inch or two and then shutting again.“What’s the matter?” said the little lady, addressing the door.“Où est mon cravatte lequel mon père m’avait envoyé de Koursk?“ asked a female voice at the door.“Ah, est-ce que, Marie . . . que . . . Really, it’s impossible . . . . Nous avons donc chez nous un homme peu connu de nous. Ask Lukerya.”“How well we speak French, though!” I read in the eyes of the little lady, who was flushing with pleasure.Soon afterwards the door opened and I saw a tall, thin girl of nineteen, in a long muslin dress with a gilt belt from which, I remember, hung a mother-of-pearl fan. She came in, dropped a curtsy, and flushed crimson. Her long nose, which was slightly pitted with smallpox, turned red first, and then the flush passed up to her eyes and her forehead.“My daughter,” chanted the little lady, “and, Manetchka, this is a young gentleman who has come,” etc.I was introduced, and expressed my surprise at the number of paper patterns. Mother and daughter dropped their eyes.“We had a fair here at Ascension,” said the mother; “we always buy materials at the fair, and then it keeps us busy with sewing till the next year’s fair comes around again. We never put things out to be made. My husband’s pay is not very ample, and we are not able to permit ourselves luxuries. So we have to make up everything ourselves.”“But who will ever wear such a number of things? There are only two of you?”“Oh . . . as though we were thinking of wearing them! They are not to be worn; they are for the trousseau!”“Ah, mamam, what are you saying?” said the daughter, and she crimsoned again. “Our visitor might suppose it was true. I don’t intend to be married. Never!”She said this, but at the very word “married” her eyes glowed.Tea, biscuits, butter, and jam were brought in, followed by raspberries and cream. At seven o’clock, we had supper, consisting of six courses, and while we were at supper I heard a loud yawn from the next room. I looked with surprise towards the door: it was a yawn that could only come from a man.“That’s my husband’s brother, Yegor Semyonitch,” the little lady explained, noticing my surprise. “He’s been living with us for the last year. Please excuse him; he cannot come in to see you. He is such an unsociable person, he is shy with strangers. He is going into a monastery. He was unfairly treated in the service, and the disappointment has preyed on his mind.”After supper the little lady showed the vestment which Yegor Semyonitch was embroidering with his own hands as an offering for the Church. Manetchka threw off her shyness for a moment and showed me the tobacco-pouch she was embroidering for her father. When I pretended to be greatly struck by her work, she flushed crimson and whispered something in her mother’s ear. The latter beamed all over, and invited me to go with her to the store-room. There I was shown five large trunks, and a number of smaller trunks and boxes.“This is her trousseau,” her mother whispered; “we made it all ourselves.”After looking at these forbidding trunks I took leave of my hospitable hostesses. They made me promise to come and see them again some day.It happened that I was able to keep this promise. Seven years after my first visit, I was sent down to the little town to give expert evidence in a case that was being tried there.As I entered the little house I heard the same “Ach!” echo through it. They recognised me at once. . . . Well they might! My first visit had been an event in their lives, and when events are few they are long remembered.I walked into the drawing-room: the mother, who had grown stouter and was already getting grey, was creeping about on the floor, cutting out some blue material. The daughter was sitting on the sofa, embroidering.There was the same smell of moth powder; there were the same patterns, the same portrait with the broken glass. But yet there was a change. Beside the portrait of the bishop hung a portrait of the Colonel, and the ladies were in mourning. The Colonel’s death had occurred a week after his promotion to be a general.Reminiscences began. . . . The widow shed tears.“We have had a terrible loss,” she said. “My husband, you know, is dead. We are alone in the world now, and have no one but ourselves to look to. Yegor Semyonitch is alive, but I have no good news to tell of him. They would not have him in the monastery on account of — of intoxicating beverages. And now in his disappointment he drinks more than ever. I am thinking of going to the Marshal of Nobility to lodge a complaint. Would you believe it, he has more than once broken open the trunks and . . . taken Manetchka’s trousseau and given it to beggars. He has taken everything out of two of the trunks! If he goes on like this, my Manetchka will be left without a trousseau at all.”“What are you saying, mamam?” said Manetchka, embarrassed. “Our visitor might suppose . . . there’s no knowing what he might suppose . . . . I shall never — never marry.”Manetchka cast her eyes up to the ceiling with a look of hope and aspiration, evidently not for a moment believing what she said.A little bald-headed masculine figure in a brown coat and goloshes instead of boots darted like a mouse across the passage and disappeared. “Yegor Semyonitch, I suppose,” I thought.I looked at the mother and daughter together. They both looked much older and terribly changed. The mother’s hair was silvered, but the daughter was so faded and withered that her mother might have been taken for her elder sister, not more than five years her senior.“I have made up my mind to go to the Marshal,” the mother said to me, forgetting she had told me this already. “I mean to make a complaint. Yegor Semyonitch lays his hands on everything we make, and offers it up for the sake of his soul. My Manetchka is left without a trousseau.”Manetchka flushed again, but this time she said nothing.“We have to make them all over again. And God knows we are not so well off. We are all alone in the world now.”“We are alone in the world,” repeated Manetchka.A year ago fate brought me once more to the little house.Walking into the drawing-room, I saw the old lady. Dressed all in black with heavy crape pleureuses, she was sitting on the sofa sewing. Beside her sat the little old man in the brown coat and the goloshes instead of boots. On seeing me, he jumped up and ran out of the room.In response to my greeting, the old lady smiled and said:“Je suis charmée de vous revoir, monsieur.““What are you making?” I asked, a little later.“It’s a blouse. When it’s finished I shall take it to the priest’s to be put away, or else Yegor Semyonitch would carry it off. I store everything at the priest’s now,” she added in a whisper.And looking at the portrait of her daughter which stood before her on the table, she sighed and said:“We are all alone in the world.”And where was the daughter? Where was Manetchka? I did not ask. I did not dare to ask the old mother dressed in her new deep mourning. And while I was in the room, and when I got up to go, no Manetchka came out to greet me. I did not hear her voice, nor her soft, timid footstep . . . .I understood, and my heart was heavy.Monsieur Rose
by Irène Némirovsky
(Narrated by Bridget Paterson)
Monsieur Rose (Mr. Rose)HE WAS AS ALOOF AND SELF-CONTAINED AS A CAT. He had an easy life; he had never married; and he was rich. Ever since he had been a child his face had had a condescending, mocking expression that inspired respect. He seemed to think that the world was peopled by fools; that, in fact, was what he did believe, and there was little to be said in response. He was well into his fifties, with nice plump cheeks, a sharp, authoritative voice, a sensitive and discreet manner, and a pointed wit. He had a good wine cellar and gave excellent dinners for selected friends. To get to know a man, you have to see him at the table or with a woman he finds attractive: whether he was peeling a piece of fruit, or kissing a woman’s hand, Monsieur Rose showed the same fastidious, coaxing attention.He cared for no one; he hated no one. The general opinion was that he was the most easygoing man in the world. He managed his fortune remarkably well. He had traveled a great deal in his youth, but this no longer gave him any pleasure. He lived on the Boulevard Malesherbes, in the house where he was born. He slept in the same room, in exactly the same corner that his bed had been as a child. His monotonous, reclusive life held joys known only to him. He approved of simple pleasures: long walks, strolls, reading, the same liqueur drunk at the same time every evening in the same quiet bar, children’s treats—fondant creams, chocolates, soft-centered sweets; he never picked out a praline rashly but, through half-closed eyes, would look thoughtfully at the pink bag and then, with a little sigh, choose one and delicately put it in his mouth. He thought that one should plan ahead, weigh things up, be wary of the unknown. He was happy to admit that this was not always easy, but patiently he tried to ward off misfortune.His greatest concern was where to invest his money and how to avoid heavy taxes. He had anticipated the war of 1940 when it was still only a shadow on the horizon, before the time came when every evening, in every Parisian drawing room, twenty or so false prophets in tails and evening dress began glibly to declare that the end of the world was upon them. He had been taking precautions since 1930, although these were not always successful. “I’ve lost a few feathers,” he confided to his close friends in 1932, “but better a feather than the whole bird.” Very early on he decided to sell the buildings he owned in Paris, one of which was the house in the Boulevard Malesherbes. He was a little ashamed to admit that he was frightened of air raids. In any case, his reasons were no one else’s business. Quietly, without any rush, he finalized some deals, as always without making or losing too much money. He chose a delightful spot in Normandy, not far from Rouen, where he bought a comfortable and well-appointed house with a large garden. After the Anschluss in 1938 he had his collection of porcelain sent there and arranged it in two glass-fronted cabinets in the ground-floor drawing room. When German troops marched into Prague, Monsieur Rose had his glassware and pictures packed away; the books and silver had left shortly before Munich. He was also one of the first Frenchmen to acquire a gas mask. In spite of all this, he remained an optimist, and declared cheerfully that everything would be fine.MONSIEUR ROSE HAD A MISTRESS, whom he had chosen astutely: she was pretty, elegant, silly, and well-meaning. Monsieur Rose preferred to forget that once, just like other men, he had almost let himself be trapped by a woman. It had happened in Vittel, in 1923. He had fallen in love with a young girl. For the first time in his life, Monsieur Rose’s eyes fell on a girl of twenty. She was the niece of the doctor who was looking after him, an orphan who had been taken in through charity; because they didn’t much care for her, they wanted to marry her off as soon as possible. She was healthy and brown-haired, with smiling and submissive eyes and a pretty mouth. He was attracted to her immediately; she awoke in him a curious feeling of tenderness and lust, along with a rather unsettling feeling of pity. She wore simple pink dresses, straight as a child’s shift, and a round comb in her hair. One day, after a charity event, she wrote to him, signing herself Lucy Maillard. Monsieur Rose had smiled when he saw the “y,” which she must have hoped would be an improvement on Lucie, a perfectly good lower-middle-class name: her bad taste enchanted him, he did not know why. It was naive, laughable, delicious: in Monsieur Rose’s eyes it symbolized a step toward her dream, a timid attempt at disguise, or a longing for escape.When he saw the girl again, he teased her about the way she spelled her name, and about the red polish on her nails. She sometimes bit them with a little girl’s ferocious energy, then, remembering her age, blushed and asked Monsieur Rose for a cigarette. She did not inhale, but made a face and, as she blew out the smoke, pursed her young girl’s lips, which Monsieur Rose found as fresh and sweet as a praline. He did once kiss her. He had met her in the public gardens; it was evening and they were alone. He had kissed her very quickly, wondering how she would react. Lifting her eyes to his, she had asked in a shaky voice, “Do you like me?”She seemed so uncertain about herself and wanted so much to be reassured, flattered, and loved, that again he could not help the pity he felt when he was with her. He said, “My darling.” When he put his hand on her thin neck, he could feel her heatbeat gently under his fingers. It made him think of the warm, palpitating body of a bird, and he whispered, “My darling little bird.” They walked on together and he kissed her again. This time she returned his kiss. Softly she asked, “Do you love me? Really? Really and truly? At home, nobody loves me.”After that he invited her to where he was staying. His intentions were honorable; he wanted only to kiss her, but she looked at him and said, “If you were to marry me … Oh! You wouldn’t want to, I’m sure. I know I’m neither pretty nor rich enough, but if you wanted to …” Seizing hold of his hand, she added, “How I would love you!”She bent her head and kissed his hand. Monsieur Rose was so overcome by this, by her perfume, by her dark hair, that he caught hold of her and, pulling her close, told her that he would marry her and that he would love her.“Are you unhappy at home?”“Yes,” she said. “Oh, yes!”“Well, from now on you’ll be happy, I promise. You will be my wife. I shall make you happy.”An hour later, when she left, they were engaged. But then he was alone once more, and gradually he came to his senses. What had he done? He wandered through the public gardens; the beautiful evening had misted over and it was raining. He went back to his rooms. He imagined his flat on the Boulevard Malesherbes with a woman whom it would be impossible to get rid of in the evenings. There would be a woman at mealtimes, always. A woman in his bed, whether he wanted her there or not. When he bolted his bedroom door, as he did every night, he was struck by the thought that a wife could perceive this simple act as unusual and almost insulting. He would never be on his own. He was still young and might one day be persuaded to have a child. Then anything would be possible: a wife, children, a family.“Ridiculous,” he said out loud, “ridiculous.”He fell into an armchair, closed his eyes while he collected his thoughts, and then reached a decision: “Impossible.”With one bound, he was on his feet. Never had he moved so fast. He dragged his suitcase into the middle of the room and started to pack. The next day, he fled. It was strange. He forgot the episode at once. For the next ten years no thought of Lucie Maillard ever returned to haunt him. Even so, in 1925 he heard about her marriage and, three years later, her death. He had learned about both events through the doctor: the first left him indifferent and the second aroused only a brief feeling of compassion. But recently he had begun to dream about her, and as he got older he did so more and more often. Yet, thank God, dreams vanish quickly, and these left just a faint feeling of unease, like a distant migraine, which went away as soon as he had sipped a few mouthfuls of his weak morning tea.Then it was 1939 and Monsieur Rose stopped having dreams. In fact, he slept less and less. How difficult it was, in this shifting, unstable world, to steer a course with certainty, as one used to do. Monsieur Rose foresaw disasters ahead. He regretted them very much, but as he could neither avoid them himself, nor help anyone else to do so, there was only one rational response: his only concern was for himself, for his own well-being and his own fortune.He would not have admitted this to anyone; the feeling remained, unformulated and troubling, deep down in his heart. Monsieur Rose was not in any way a cynic. Along with everyone else, he talked about necessity and paid homage to the nobility of sacrifice; he was happy to talk, forcefully, about the citizen’s obligations and rights, but in his mind there was an essential difference between himself and other people: he left the obligations to them, keeping only the rights for himself. It was a natural reaction for him, almost an instinctive one. He could not help but relate everything he saw, heard, or read to himself; he saw the world through the prism of his own preoccupations. As these depended on the fate of the world, this was hugely important to him. Thus his conscience was clear. He was able to convince himself with no difficulty that it was Europe’s destiny that was preventing him from sleeping, and that by abandoning his peace of mind in this way he was sacrificing what he held most dear. What more could he do? He was no longer young and had no children. In any case, he was overburdened with taxes. That was enough.One day he decided he must rescue as much as he possibly could.How could he protect his money? Neither England nor America was, in his view, a safe haven. He deliberated for a long time, using all his experience, caution, and skill to make a careful comparison of every country in Europe, as well as in the rest of the world. None of them seemed to be well enough defended or secure enough to act as his strong room. Finally he chose Norway, where he had financial interests.At the outbreak of war he was at home in Normandy. He drank fresh milk and tended his roses. When he reappeared in Paris in November he was able to smile at some of the stories he was told about other people who had left.“Really, my dear fellow, you sent your wife off to the Hérault? What a strange idea!”“So what did you do?”“Oh, I just prolonged my holiday. September was so beautiful! I have to tell you that I feel perfectly calm, perfectly indifferent to whatever happens to me. An old bachelor like myself …”Absentmindedly he picked up a paper bag tied with gilt thread that had been left on the table, took a sugared almond from it and, chewing thoughtfully, went on: “I’m no use to anyone, not even myself. Sometimes I feel I’ve had enough. Now I’ve seen two wars. This violent and bloody world disgusts me.”And so the winter passed. It was now springtime and Paris had never looked so lovely. There was something melancholy, tender, and luminous about the atmosphere—such a rare and precious beauty that, in spite of himself, Monsieur Rose kept putting off the day of his departure.He had, in fact, made very specific plans: he would spend this summer of 1940 quietly in Normandy. Then he would take a short trip to England. He had been feeling weary and overwrought for some time; the fighting in Norway had hit him hard. He hoped, indeed was fairly sure, that all was not lost. Nevertheless … Yet he had behaved reasonably, with thought, logic, and caution. But reason and caution were gradually losing their hold and their traditional value. As they came into contact with this insane world, they were overturned and came adrift—just as scientific instruments go off course in extreme atmospheric conditions.Happily, Monsieur Rose’s fortune had been only diminished by the disaster in Norway; it had not disappeared altogether. And he still had his house in Normandy, his china, his pictures, his valuables, and his gold. Nevertheless, he felt angry and bitter, rather like a betrayed lover. Feeling as he did, he dreaded the solitude of the countryside. This splendid Parisian spring suited him better.It took the night of the tenth of June finally to make him leave. He had slept badly; the sirens had woken him twice and, although he had not gotten out of bed, his sleep had been shattered by their wailing, by the sound of his neighbors hurrying downstairs, and by antiaircraft fire nearby. At dawn he fell deeply asleep and dreamed that he was looking for something, he knew not what, in a strange house, where the doors banged and there were wisps of straw and scraps of wrapping paper all over the floor; someone outside the room shouted at him to hurry up, while he searched desperately for a very dear and precious object or person that he could not find; but he had to leave, and in his dream he was weeping. He was in such anguish that when he woke up his heart was beating furiously. When he discovered what had happened in the night he became very thoughtful. It was time to leave.THINGS WERE NO BETTER in Normandy. It was ridiculous, he knew. What danger threatened him in this peaceful countryside? In any case, it was not anxiety he felt but a kind of sadness. He felt old, far older than his years. He was out of place in this world. He was a survivor, in fact, of a species that had almost disappeared; his habits and his tastes were leftovers from another era. Something else was needed, he did not know what—youth perhaps? But he was no longer young. He had never been young.And so he waited.He did not have to wait long. With one bound the war pounced on Monsieur Rose’s peaceful retreat, like a wild animal bursting from its lair. Once more he had to leave. All his silver, books, valuables, and gold, which he had taken such trouble to arrange so carefully, to hang, label, or lock away, were now in chaos: some were buried in the garden, and the rest piled into the car when Monsieur Rose finally decided to go.“We should have left yesterday,” said Robert, the chauffeur.Monsieur Rose had employed him only since the outbreak of war as a replacement for the previous one, who had been called up. He was a short, ginger-haired, puny man who was exempt from military service. He drove well and did not seem to be dishonest. But Monsieur Rose could barely tolerate him and did so only because he couldn’t find anyone else. He spoke with a working-class Parisian accent and was offhand, if not insolent, in his manner. Monsieur Rose liked him less and less. He grumbled, shrugged his shoulders, and was almost rude when spoken to.They drove all day. When evening came Monsieur Rose was hungry. He was surprised that, in the midst of such a disaster, he could feel such normal, healthy emotions.“Stop as soon as you see a village,” he said to the chauffeur.He could see only the back of Robert’s neck, the ginger hair under the blue cap.Robert said nothing, but his big red ears quivered; his back seemed to hunch and the back of his neck to crease; impossible to know how he did it, but seen from behind, and without saying a word, he managed to express so much disapproval, such sarcasm, that Monsieur Rose went purple with anger and shouted, “Stop at once!”“Here?”“Yes, here. I’m hungry.”“And what is Monsieur going to eat? I can’t see a restaurant.”“I can see a farm. At times like these,” Monsieur Rose said sadly and severely, “one shouldn’t make difficulties.”“It’s not difficult to stop,” Robert said with a smirk (the car had been stuck for an hour in an unimaginably bad traffic jam). “The problem will be to get going again.”“Do what I tell you,” Monsieur Rose replied. “Get out of the car and run to that house. Buy whatever you can, bread, ham, fruit … oh yes, and a bottle of mineral water; I’m dying of thirst!”“So am I,” said Robert. Pulling his cap down over his eyes, he climbed out of the car.Monsieur Rose
by Irène Némirovsky
(Narrated by Bridget Paterson)
“Well,” thought Monsieur Rose, “I’ll get even with him tomorrow.”Tomorrow … where would he be tomorrow? He knew there was an airfield not far away, and an army camp a bit farther on. Even farther away there were railway lines, bridges, and large factories. It would soon be dark. Every section of the road hid dangers. He had heard that Rouen was burning. What would have happened to his house? He had left it only that morning and was still quite close to it, yet perhaps it was now nothing more than ashes? Strangely, however, as the hours went by he thought less and less about what he had left behind. If he had lost everything, so be it! He still had his life. His life would be saved. At times like this the future shrinks with dizzying speed. He no longer thought about next year or next month but only about today, tonight, the next hour. He looked for nothing beyond that. He was hungry and thirsty; all he wanted was a bit of bread and a glass of water. To think that it had not occurred to him to bring any provisions! He had thought of everything else. He had locked up the house; filed away letters and business documents; remembered his dress clothes, razors, and stiff collars; but he had nothing to eat. Robert wasn’t coming back. And the house looked uninhabited. Had they all fled?Robert appeared and said simply, “There’s nobody there. No one’s answering the door.”“We’ll try a bit further on, as soon as we see a house.”For a long time they were forced to wait where they were. At last the line of cars began to move. Monsieur Rose tapped on the window. “Here, I can see a light.”Robert got out of the car. Monsieur Rose drummed the “March of the Little Wooden Soldiers” on his knee. The minutes passed. Robert came back empty-handed.“There’s nothing.”“What do you mean, nothing? There are people living there.”“They’re packing.”“But they must have a bit of bread left, or cheese, or pâté, at least something to eat?”“Nothing,” said Robert again. “Monsieur must realize, with all the traffic there is on this road … we’ll get nothing to eat until tomorrow … or next week. If Monsieur doesn’t believe me, he can go and look for himself.”Monsieur Rose was already getting out of the car.“I certainly will. You’re too tactless, my boy. I’m sure you talked to them rudely and disagreeably—as you so often do. People aren’t savages, for God’s sake! You don’t refuse to give a bit of bread to your neighbor and anyway,” he finished angrily, “I’m not asking for charity!”He made his way with difficulty through the cars trapped bumper to bumper. Their headlights were off; people’s heads were tilted back, as their eyes anxiously followed a shadow flitting from one star to another. Was it a cloud or an enemy plane?He thought he could hear the noise of an engine, but it was just the constant, muffled sound of the crowd, which was rising into the sky: footsteps, voices, bicycles being wheeled over stones on the road, the stifled, gasping breaths of thousands of people, and the occasional cries of children. Monsieur Rose walked away from this with a feeling of relief, as if waking from a nightmare. It seemed to him that he had been miraculously transported back several centuries and that he had become part of one of the great human migrations of the past; he felt horror-struck and ashamed. Rather more quickly than he would normally have done, he walked up the path to the farm. Robert had not been lying. In the main room he saw two women weeping as they threw household linen into an unfolded blanket. An old woman stood at the door, ready to flee, two children in her arms and two more clinging to her skirt. The kitchen cupboard was open and empty.“There’s nothing, monsieur, I’m sorry. We have nothing left. Look, we only have a little dry sausage left for ourselves, and some milk for the children. That’s all. We’re leaving now.”Monsieur Rose apologized and retraced his steps.“I’m going to have trouble finding Robert,” he thought, as from the top of the slope, he watched the black stream winding slowly on.All the cars looked the same with their mattresses fixed to the roof. His car had probably moved on a bit. He could no longer tell which was his. He walked on and called out, “Robert! Robert!”At first his voice was strong and forceful, then it became anxious, then frightened, then shaky and pleading. No one replied. Robert had abandoned him; he had gone with the car, the trunks, the silver, and the clothes.“Bastard! Thief!” howled Monsieur Rose, losing his head.He ran, stumbling along the top of the bank, looking for he knew not what—an inspector, a local policeman, someone he could complain to, who would protect him. But there was no one. Everyone was fleeing and no one was interested in him.Finally, out of breath, Monsieur Rose collapsed onto the grass. As he clutched his chest, his hand touched his wallet and he felt calmer. It was as if he had rediscovered solid ground: he felt anchored and strong, ready to take his place in the world again.“This has simply been a difficult night to get through. I’ll report Robert first thing in the morning and he’ll be locked up. There’s no question of him getting across the border. And if he stays in France, I’ll be able to find him.”All he had to do now was to get to a town or a village. But how? Everywhere he looked the road was packed with cars, trucks, three-wheelers, motor bicycles with sidecars, and carts, all inching slowly forward; the parcels, boxes, prams, and bicycles piled on top of them looked like rickety scaffolding towers. There was nowhere to sit, nothing to hold on to. No. There was no room for Monsieur Rose! And the crowd of pedestrians was already sweeping him along.“Well then, dammit, I’ll walk!” he said out loud.“Has your car been pinched, monsieur?” asked a young man walking beside him. “It’s my bike that’s gone.”At first Monsieur Rose did not answer. Normally he did not talk to strangers. He looked at the young man, who must have been sixteen or seventeen but was so well-built, sturdy, and tall that Monsieur Rose thought to himself, “He could be useful.”Was this a throwback to former times, when the only things that mattered were strong muscles and hard fists? The young man could, after all, help Monsieur Rose as they walked; he could find him something to eat, or somewhere to stay.Monsieur Rose said, eventually, “Yes, my driver thought it a good joke to abandon me. But what about you?”“Oh, someone asked me to lend a hand repairing a flat tire. I left my bike in a ditch and when I went back it was gone. Luckily I’ve got a good pair of legs.”“Yes, that is lucky. Have you come a long way?”“From my school, fifty kilometers away. We were all sent home. I was supposed to go with one of the teachers. But in the end it was such chaos that I never found him. We were bombed, so I left.”“What about your family?”“They’re in the country, near Tours.”“Are you planning to join them?”“In theory, yes … I set off hoping to do so, but I have to tell you, monsieur, that I’ve changed my mind now. I’m seventeen. I could serve my country. As I said to my father at the beginning of the war, now people must make a choice between leading a heroic life or an easy one.”“That choice has already been made for me,” muttered Monsieur Rose bitterly, as he stumbled over the stones in the road.The young man smiled.“Of course, at your age, monsieur, it’s hard. But I thought I’d join up. I know there’s a camp near Orléans. I’ll enlist; every man ought to fight.”“What’s your name, young man?” asked Monsieur Rose.“Marc. Marc Beaumont.”“Do you live in Paris?”“Yes, monsieur.”They went on in silence for a while. They walked for hour after hour. It seemed impossible for the crowd to get any bigger, but from every track and every crossroads shadows appeared, joining the first wave of refugees and walking beside them in silence. People did not talk much; no one complained, no one cried or shouted; everyone instinctively saved their breath for walking. Monsieur Rose’s painful feet could hardly carry him.“Lean on me, monsieur, don’t worry, I’m strong,” the boy said. “You’ve had enough.”“I need to rest …”“If you’d like to …”They tumbled into a ditch and instantly the young man fell asleep. But Monsieur Rose was at an age when exhaustion overstimulates the mind and drives sleep away. He lay quite still, occasionally covering his eyes with his hands.“What a nightmare,” he said mechanically. “What a nightmare …”THE JUNE NIGHT was soon over. In the morning they set off again. There was no food to be had, and nowhere to stay. People slept in the fields, by the side of the road, or in the woods. After forty-eight hours, with his grimy shirt, crumpled suit, and dusty shoes, Monsieur Rose—who had not washed or shaved for two days—looked like a tramp.“I suppose we’ll carry on like this, on foot, until we reach Tours,” Marc Beaumont said.Monsieur Rose protested sharply, “On foot! We’re not traveling on foot! That’s ridiculous! You mustn’t give in to the deplorable habit of overdramatizing the situation, my boy. Later you’ll be able to tell your children, ‘During the great exodus of 1940 I walked from Normandy to Tours.’ In fact, you will have walked for part of the way, but for some of it you will have traveled in a truck or a car, or even on a bicycle, and so on and so forth. You should realize that there’s no such thing as pure tragedy; there are always varying degrees of it.” As he spoke, Monsieur Rose fell and then got up again, for his swollen knees were making it increasingly difficult for him to walk.In fact, toward evening they were picked up by a passing truck. Some women who had been evacuated from a Parisian factory were sheltering under its wet tarpaulin. It was raining; the hastily erected cover let in water, which trickled down the women’s necks. They had brought folding stools with them, on which they sat motionless, hunching their backs against the rain, guarding parcels at their feet and children on their laps. Monsieur Rose and Marc Beaumont were allocated a stool between them, and an umbrella that fell open and swung about at every jolt in the road. After a few hours they had to give up their places to some children who were picked up from the edge of a field. Fortunately it had stopped raining. They carried on walking, slept again, found some eggs in an abandoned farm, which they swallowed raw, and dragged themselves on. In a village some soldiers gave them food and told them to leave at once, as there was going to be fighting. They would not allow Marc to join them. “It’s not men we need, sonny, it’s equipment.” Monsieur Rose and Marc set off again.Marc, at least, was able to sleep. As soon as he lay down on the ground, he was dead to the world. But Monsieur Rose found only brief moments of rest and oblivion between nightmares. He looked at his companion closely. The child had something of poor Lucie Maillard about him. He had even asked Marc about his mother’s name, somehow imagining that there might be a family link between them. But there was nothing. Nothing linked the living teenager and the dead girl, other than the feeling their youth aroused in Monsieur Rose. Marc provoked an irritable and affectionate pity in him, just as Lucie once had. He was forever ready to carry a child, pick up a parcel, or give away his meager share of food whenever he found any. On the fifth day he lost his watch. Monsieur Rose jeered at him, “Well, of course, if you will run into the woods looking for some woman’s bag … If at least she had been pretty … but that old hag … That’s how you let your bicycle be stolen. You’re always going to be robbed in life.”“Oh, monsieur!” said Marc. “I won’t be the only one.”He laughed. He could laugh still: he was even thinner, he was pale and hungry, yet he laughed.“What does it matter, monsieur?”“A bicycle might have saved your life.”“Oh, I’ll get out of this somehow!”“Of course you will, of course … I hope I will, too. Although I can’t imagine what state I’ll be in!”THINGS BECAME MORE and more nightmarish. None of the restaurants, hotels, or private houses had a single spare room left, not even a bed or a square meter of space on the floor, and none could offer even a crust of bread. When they reached Chartres, the refugees were given soup at the gate of a barracks, and Monsieur Rose wept for joy when he was given his helping.They continued south, toward the Loire. It seemed as if they would never get there. One night there was a shout of “run for your life!” and several bombs fell. Marc and Monsieur Rose were lying on the ground, in the shelter of a little wall; Monsieur Rose was scrabbling at the earth with his nails, as if he wanted to hide underneath it. Then he felt Marc’s hand on his shoulder, a firm, gentle, but still childlike hand, which patted him shyly and affectionately: it was as if he were a new boy in the playground being reassured.The plane went away. No one had been hurt, but a house could be seen burning in the distance. In a low voice, Monsieur Rose said, “This is too much. It’s too much for me. I can’t face it.”“We’ll be fine, though, you’ll see,” said Marc, trying to laugh.“But you’re seventeen! You’re not afraid of death. You don’t love life at seventeen! I want to save my life, don’t you see? I may be poor, old, and weak, the world may be in ruins, but I still want to live.”They set off again. Monsieur Rose didn’t talk anymore. They were getting nearer the Loire. They didn’t know how long they had been walking. There was a second air raid. They were in a little group of refugees, huddled together: the instinct that makes a herd of animals gather together in a storm drew them close to one another. Marc sheltered Monsieur Rose with his body. He was injured but Monsieur Rose was unharmed. He bandaged his young companion as best he could and they went on walking. At last the bridges of the Loire were in sight.Suddenly, Monsieur Rose collapsed.“I can’t walk any further. It’s impossible. I’d rather die here.”“I can’t carry on either,” said Marc.His wound was bleeding and he stumbled at every step. Both of them, the old man and the boy, stayed where they were, in a heap by the side of the road, watching the Loire glinting in the sunshine and the flood of refugees going past. Monsieur Rose felt calm, indifferent, detached from everything, from his possessions, from his life. Then, suddenly galvanized, he stood up. Someone was shouting. Someone was calling his name: “Monsieur Rose! Is that you, Monsieur Rose?”He saw a face he knew at a car window. He could not put a name to it; it seemed to belong to another world. Whether it was a friend or a distant relation, a colleague or an enemy, what did it matter? It was a man with a car. Overloaded, of course, full of parcels, women, and children like all the others, but at least it was a car.“Do you have room for me?” he called out. “My car was stolen. I’ve been walking since Rouen. I can’t go another step. For pity’s sake, take me!”Inside the car they consulted one another. A woman cried out, “Impossible!”Another woman said, “They’re going to blow up the bridges over the Loire. They won’t be able to get across.”She leaned toward Monsieur Rose, saying, “Get in. I’ve no idea how, but just get in.”Monsieur Rose moved toward the car and was about to climb in when he remembered Marc. “Make room for this young man, too …”“Out of the question, my poor friend.”“I won’t leave him,” said Monsieur Rose.He was so tired that his voice sounded faint and distant to his own ears, as if it were someone else’s.“Is he a relation of yours?”“No. Never mind. He’s injured. I can’t abandon him.”“We don’t have room.”At that moment someone shouted, “The bridges! The bridges are going to go up!”The car accelerated away. Monsieur Rose closed his eyes. It was over; he had lost his life. Why? For this child who meant nothing to him? He heard the voice of a woman beside him shouting, “There are people on it! People! There are cars!”In the frightful chaos and confusion the bridge had been blown up too soon; so, too, had the refugees’ cars, including the one that Monsieur Rose had refused to get into.Pale and trembling, he fell down next to Marc, barely realizing that his life had just been restored to him.
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