Oblomov - Ivan Goncharov [171]
‘It’s Granny. She’s been coughing for the last seven years.’
And the door was slammed to.
‘How – how simple she is,’ Oblomov thought. ‘And there is something about her. And she is very clean, too!’
He had not met the landlady’s brother yet. Every now and then early in the morning, when he was still in bed, he caught sight of a man with a large paper parcel under his arm rushing off on the other side of the fence and disappearing in the street; at five o’clock the same man with the paper parcel rushed past the windows and disappeared behind the front door. He was never heard in the house. And yet there could be no doubt, especially in the mornings, that the house was full of people: there was a clatter of knives in the kitchen; the peasant woman could be heard rinsing something in a corner of the yard; the caretaker was chopping wood or bringing the barrel of water; through the wall the children could be heard crying, or there came the sound of the old woman’s dry, persistent cough.
Oblomov had the four best rooms in the house. The landlady and her family occupied the two back rooms, and her brother lived upstairs in the attic. Oblomov’s study and bedroom looked out into the yard, the drawing-room faced the little garden, and the reception-room the big kitchen garden with the cabbages and potatoes. At the drawing-room windows the curtains were of faded chintz. Plain chairs, in imitation walnut, were placed along the walls; a card-table stood under the looking-glass; on the window-sills were pots of geranium and African marigold, and four cages with siskins and canaries hung in the windows.
The landlady’s brother walked in on tiptoe and bowed three times in answer to Oblomov’s greeting. His civil servant’s uniform was buttoned to the top, so that it was impossible to say whether he wore a shirt under it or not; his tie was done up in a knot and the ends tucked in. He was a man of about forty with a straight tuft of hair on the forehead and two similar tufts over his temples, waving carelessly in the wind and resembling a dog’s ears of medium size. His grey eyes never looked directly at an object, but first glanced at it stealthily and only then fixed themselves upon it. He seemed to be ashamed of his hands, and as he talked he tried to hide them behind his back, or put one behind his back and thrust the other in the breast of his coat. When giving some paper to his chief and explaining some point in it, he kept one hand behind his back and carefully pointed to some line or word with the middle finger of the other hand, which he held with his nail downwards, and, having shown it, at once withdrew his hand, perhaps because his fingers were rather thick and red and shook a little and he believed, with good reason, that it was not quite nice to display them too often.
‘I believe, sir,’ he said, throwing his double glance at Oblomov, ‘that you were so good as to ask me to come and see you.’
‘Yes,’ Oblomov replied courteously, ‘I wanted to talk to you about my flat. Please sit down.’
After the second invitation Ivan Matveyich ventured to sit down, leaning over with his entire body and thrusting his hands into his sleeves.
‘I’m afraid I have to look for another flat,’ said Oblomov, ‘and I should therefore like to sub-let this one.’
‘It is difficult to sub-let it now,’ Ivan Matveyevich said, coughing into his hands and hiding them quickly in his sleeves. ‘If you’d come to see me at the end of summer, there were lots of people after it.’
‘I did call, but you were not in,’ Oblomov interrupted.
‘My sister told me,’ the civil servant added. ‘But don’t worry about your flat: you’ll be very comfortable here. The birds are not disturbing you, are they?’
‘Which birds?’
‘The hens, sir.’
Though Oblomov constantly heard from early morning the deep cackling of a broody hen and the chirping of chicks under his window, he paid no attention to it. Olga’s image was before his mind’s eye and he scarcely noticed what happened around him.
‘No, I don’t mind that,’ he said.