Forty Stories - Anton Chekhov [56]
“Filling your belly, eh?” he said, seeing the mare’s shining eyes. “Well, eat up! We haven’t earned enough for oats, but we can eat hay. Oh, I’m too old to be driving. My son should be driving, not me. He was a real cabdriver, and he should be alive now.…”
Iona was silent for a moment, and then he went on: “That’s how it is, old girl. My son, Kuzma Ionich, is no more. He died on us. Now let’s say you had a foal, and you were the foal’s mother, and suddenly, let’s say, the same little foal departed this life. You’d be sorry, eh?”
The little mare munched and listened and breathed on his hands.
Surrendering to his grief, Iona told her the whole story.
January 1886
Anyuta
IN one of those very cheap rooms in the Lisbon rooming house, Stepan Klochkov, a third-year medical student, was pacing up and down as he applied himself zealously to cramming from a medical textbook. The strain of memorizing the words made his mouth dry, and sweat dampened his forehead.
Anyuta, who roomed with him, sat on a stool by the window, where the edges were white with icy tracery. She was a small, thin brunette, twenty-five years old, very pale, with gentle gray eyes. Head bent, she was embroidering the collar of a man’s shirt with red thread. She was working hurriedly, against time. It was afternoon, and the clock in the passageway outside drowsily struck two o’clock, but the room was still in disorder. Rumpled bedclothes, pillows scattered everywhere, books, clothes, a large filthy washbasin filled with soapy slop water in which cigarette butts were floating, filth on the floor—everything seemed to have been hurled down in a heap, crumpled, deliberately thrown into confusion.
“The right lung consists of three lobes …” Klochkov recited. “Boundaries! Upper lobe on anterior wall of the chest reaches fourth or fifth rib, on the lateral surface, the fourth rib … behind up to the spina scapulae …”
Klochkov tried to visualize what he was reading, and raised his eyes to the ceiling. Unable to form a clear picture, he began to feel his upper ribs through his waistcoat.
“These ribs resemble the keys of a piano,” he said. “To avoid being confused by them, you simply must make a mental picture of them. You have to study them on the skeleton and on the living body. Come here, Anyuta! Let’s get this thing straight!”
Anyuta put down her sewing, removed her jacket, and straightened her shoulders. Kluchkov sat down facing her, frowned, and began to count her ribs.
“Hm! The first rib can’t be felt.… It’s behind the collarbone. This must be the second rib.… Oh yes, and here is the third, and the fourth.… Hm … Well, why are you shivering?”
“Your fingers are cold!”
“Nonsense, it won’t kill you! Don’t wriggle about so much. This must be the third, and here’s the fourth.… You’re so thin, and yet I can hardly feel your ribs.… Here’s the second.… Here’s the third.… No, you are getting confused. You don’t see the thing clearly. I shall have to draw it. Where is my piece of charcoal?”
Klochkov took the charcoal crayon and began to sketch some parallel lines corresponding to the ribs on Anyuta’s chest.
“Wonderful! Now everything is clear as daylight. Now let me sound your chest. Stand up!”
Anyuta stood up, raising her chin. Klochkov began to tap her chest, becoming so deeply immersed in the task that he did not notice that her lips, nose, and fingers were turning blue with cold. She shivered, and then she was afraid the student would see her shivering, stop drawing lines on her chest, stop tapping her, and then perhaps he would fail miserably in the examinations.
“Now it’s all clear,” Klochkov said, and he stopped tapping her. “Just sit there, don’t rub off the charcoal, and I’ll learn some more.”
Once again the student began pacing up and down the room, memorizing. Anyuta had black stripes across her chest, and looked as though she had been tattooed. She sat there thinking, huddled up, shivering with cold. She was never talkative, always silent, thinking, thinking.…
In six or seven years of wandering from one furnished room to another,