Oblomov - Ivan Goncharov [166]
‘Please come in, sir,’ said the old woman, coming back, and she led Oblomov through a small entrance hall into a fairly large room and asked him to wait. ‘The lady of the house will be here presently,’ she added.
‘And the dog is still barking,’ thought Oblomov, examining the room.
Suddenly his eyes lighted on familiar objects: the whole room was littered with his belongings. Tables covered in dust; chairs heaped in a pile on the bed; mattresses, crockery, cupboards – all thrown together in confusion.
‘What on earth? Haven’t they done anything about them – sorted them out, tidied them up?’ he said. ‘How disgusting!’
Suddenly a door creaked behind him, and the woman he had seen with the bare neck and elbows came into the room. She was about thirty. Her complexion was so fair and her face so plump that it seemed that the colour could not force its way through her cheeks. She had practically no eyebrows, and in their place she had two seemingly slightly swollen shiny patches with scanty fair hair on them. Her eyes were grey and as good-humoured as the whole expression of her face; her hands were white but coarse, with knotted blue veins standing out. She wore a close-fitting dress, and it was quite obvious that she used no artifice, not even an extra petticoat, to increase the size of her hips and make her waist look smaller. That was why even when she was dressed, as long as she wore no shawl she would without any danger to her modesty serve a sculptor or a painter as a model of a fine, well-developed bosom. In comparison with her smart shawl and Sunday bonnet, her dress looked old and worn.
She had not been expecting visitors, and when Oblomov asked to see her, she threw on her Sunday shawl over her ordinary everyday dress and covered her head with a bonnet. She came in timidly and stopped, looking shyly at Oblomov.
He got up and bowed.
‘I have the pleasure of meeting Mrs Pshenitzyn, have I not?’ he asked.
‘Yes, sir,’ she replied. ‘Would you perhaps like to speak to my brother?’ she asked hesitantly. ‘I’m afraid he is at the office. He never comes home before five.’
‘No, it was you I wanted to see,’ Oblomov began when she had sat down on the sofa as far away from him as possible, looking at the ends of her shawl which covered her down to the ground like a horse-cloth. She hid her hands under the shawl too.
‘I have rented rooms, but now, owing to certain circumstances, I have to find a flat in another part of the town, so I have come to discuss the matter with you.’
She listened to him dully and fell into thought.
‘I’m afraid my brother isn’t in,’ she said after a pause.
‘But this house is yours, isn’t it?’ Oblomov said.
‘Yes,’ she replied briefly.
‘Well, in that case you ought to be able to decide for yourself, oughtn’t you?’
‘But my brother isn’t in, and he attends to everything,’ she said monotonously, looking straight at Oblomov for the first time and then lowering her eyes to the shawl again.
‘She has an ordinary but pleasant face,’ Oblomov decided condescendingly. ‘Must be a good woman!’
At that moment a little girl’s head was thrust through the door. Agafya Matveyevna nodded to her sternly without being observed by Oblomov, and she disappeared.
‘And in what Ministry does your brother work?’
‘In some Government office.’
‘Which one?’
‘Where peasants are registered. I’m afraid I don’t know what it’s called.’
She smiled good-naturedly, and almost at once her face assumed its normal expression.
‘Do you live here alone with your brother?’ asked Oblomov.
‘No, I have two children by my late husband, a boy aged eight and a girl aged six,’ the landlady began talking readily enough and her face became more animated, ‘and we have also our grandmother living with us; she’s an invalid and can hardly walk, and she only goes to church; she used to go to the market with Akulina, but she has given it up since St Nicholas’ day: her legs have begun to swell. And even in church she has to sit