Oblomov - Ivan Goncharov [121]
‘You shouldn’t open the windows and then shut the flues, dear,’ she said affectionately. ‘You’ll chill the rooms again.’
‘Well, and how would you do it?’ he asked with the rudeness of a husband. ‘When would you open the windows?’
‘Why, dear, when lighting the stove,’ she answered gently. ‘The air will be drawn out and the room will get warm again.’
‘What a silly fool!’ he said. ‘I’ve been doing it like that for twenty years and I’m not going to change it for you.’
On the same shelf in the cupboard he kept tea, sugar, lemons, silver, and, next to it, shoe-polish, brushes, and soap. One day he came home and found the soap on the wash-stand, the brushes and shoe-polish on the kitchen window-ledge, and the tea and sugar in a separate drawer.
‘What do you mean by turning everything upside-down just as you please?’ he asked sternly. ‘I’ve put it all together on purpose to have it handy, and now you’ve come and put it all in different places!’
‘But I did it, dear, so that the tea shouldn’t smell of soap,’ she remarked gently.
Another time she pointed out to Zakhar two or three moth holes in Oblomov’s clothes and told him that he ought to shake and brush them at least once a week.
‘Let me give them a brush, dear,’ she concluded affectionately.
He snatched the brush and Oblomov’s frock-coat out of her hands and put the coat back in the wardrobe. When on another occasion he began, as usual, to blame his master for scolding him without reason for the blackbeetles though he had not ‘invented them’, Anisya, without saying a word, removed all the pieces and crumbs of black bread which had been lying on the shelves from time immemorial and swept out and washed all the cupboards and crockery – and the blackbeetles disappeared almost completely. Zakhar still did not properly understand what it was all about, and merely attributed it to her zeal. But one day, when he took a tray with cups and glasses to his master’s room and, dropping two glasses on the floor, began swearing as usual and was about to throw the whole tray down on the floor, Anisya took the tray from him, replaced the broken glasses and put the bread and the sugar-basin on the tray, arranging everything in such a way that not a cup moved, and then demonstrated to him how to pick up the tray with one hand and hold it firmly with the other; then she walked up and down the room twice, turning the tray to left and to right, and not a single spoon moved – it suddenly dawned on Zakhar that Anisya was cleverer than he. He snatched the tray from her, dropping the glasses, and could never forgive her for it.
‘You see how it’s done,’ she added quietly.
He gave her a look of dull-witted superciliousness, but she only grinned.
‘Oh, you silly peasant woman; you’re trying to be clever, are you? You don’t know the sort of a house we had in Oblomovka, do you now? Why, everything depended on me there. I had fifteen footmen and page-boys under me, not to mention other servants! And as for women like you, there were so many of them that I couldn’t remember all their names. And you’re trying to teach me, are you? Oh, you – –’
‘But I mean well,’ she began.
‘All right, all right!’ he wheezed, raising his elbow menacingly. ‘Get out of the master’s room. To the kitchen with you – and mind your woman’s business!’
She grinned and went out, while he looked at her gloomily out of the corner of his eye. His pride was hurt, and he treated Anisya dismally. When, however, Oblomov asked for something, and it could not be found or had been broken, or when there was confusion in the house and a storm, accompanied by ‘pathetic words’, gathered over Zakhar’s head, Zakhar winked at Anisya, motioned towards his master’s study, and pointing to it with his thumb, said in an imperious whisper: ‘Go and see what the master wants, will you?’ Anisya went, and the storm was always averted by a simple explanation. Indeed,