Oblomov - Ivan Goncharov [195]
‘No, I don’t think I do – really. You are so strange that I don’t know what to think. My mind misgives me and I lose hope – soon we shall cease to understand each other: if that happens, it will go badly with us.’
They were silent.
‘What have you been doing all this time?’ she asked, looking round the room for the first time. ‘It isn’t nice here – such low ceilings! The windows are small, the wallpaper old…. What are your other rooms like?’
He rushed to show her his flat so as not to have to answer her questions about what he had been doing all that time. When she resumed her seat on the sofa, he again sat down on the rug at her feet.
‘Well, what have you been doing this fortnight?’ She repeated her question.
‘Reading, writing, thinking of you.’
‘Have you read my books? What are they like? I think I’ll take them back.’
She picked up a book from the table and looked at the open page: it was covered with dust.
‘You haven’t been reading!’ she said.
‘No,’ he replied.
She looked at the crumpled, embroidered cushions, at the untidiness of the room, the dusty windows, the writing-desk, turned over several dust-covered papers, touched the pen in the dry inkwell, and looked at him in amazement.
‘What have you been doing?’ she repeated. ‘You haven’t been reading or writing, have you?’
‘I had so little time,’ he began, faltering. ‘When I get up in the morning they are tidying the rooms, they keep disturbing me, there follows the talk about dinner, the landlady’s children come in and ask me to correct their sums, then there’s dinner. After dinner – when is there time to read?’
‘You slept after dinner,’ she said in so positive a tone of voice that after a moment’s hesitation, he replied softly:
‘Yes.’
‘But why?’
‘So as not to notice the time: you were not with me, Olga, and life without you is dull and unbearable.’
He stopped short, and she looked sternly at him.
‘Ilya,’ she began earnestly, ‘do you remember the day in the park when you told me that you felt alive again, when you assured me that I was the aim of your life and your ideal, when you took me by the hand and said that it was yours – do you remember how I gave you my consent?’
‘How could I forget it? Hasn’t it transformed my whole life? Don’t you see how happy I am?’
‘No, I don’t. You have deceived me,’ she said coldly. ‘You’re letting yourself go once more….’
‘Deceived you? Aren’t you ashamed to say that? I swear I’d throw myself into an abyss this very minute – –’
‘Yes, indeed, if the abyss were here right at your feet at this moment,’ she interrupted, ‘but if it were put off for three days you would have changed your mind and got frightened, especially if Zakhar or Anisya began talking about it. That is not love.’
‘Do you doubt my love?’ he began warmly. ‘Do you think that I am delaying out of fear for myself, and not for you? Don’t I guard your good name? Don’t I watch over you like a mother so that no gossip should dare to touch you? Oh, Olga! Ask for proofs! I tell you again that if you could be happier with another man, I’d resign my rights to him without a murmur. If someone had to sacrifice his life for you, I’d be happy to die!’ he concluded with tears in his eyes.
‘But that’s not necessary, no one asks you to! What do I need your life for? Just do what is necessary. It’s an old trick of dishonest people to offer sacrifices which are unnecessary and which cannot be made so as to get out of making those that are necessary. You’re not crafty – I know that, but – –’
‘You don’t know what these passions and anxieties have cost me!’ he went on. ‘I have had no other thought since I met you. And now, too, I repeat that you are my only aim, you alone. I shall die, I shall go mad if I have not got you beside me! I breathe, look, think, and feel only with you. Why are you surprised that I fall asleep and go to pieces on the days I don’t see you? Nothing pleases me, I’m sick