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John William Tuohy lives in Washington DC

HE AND SHE



ANTON CHEKHOV | FROM:RUSSIAN
HE AND SHE
Translated by : Michele A. Berdy

They are nomads. For months, they grace only Paris with their presence, dismissing Berlin, Vienna, Naples, Madrid, St. Petersburg and other capitals. In Paris they feel quite at home; for them, Paris is the capital, their residence, and all the rest of Europe is a dull and boring province worthy of being gazed upon only through the lowered curtains of grand-hôtels or from the stage. They are not old, but they’ve already been to all the European capitals two or three times. They are bored with Europe. They have begun to talk about a trip to America, and will continue to talk about it, until they are convinced that her voice is not so splendid that it should be shared on both hemispheres.
They are not easy to meet. It’s nigh impossible to see them on the streets because they travel by carriage, and they travel in the evening or at night when it is already dark. They sleep until midday. They usually wake in poor spirits and do not receive anyone. They receive visitors only occasionally, at odd moments backstage or at dinner.
You can see her on postcards, which are for sale. On postcards she is a great beauty, whereas in the flesh she has never been beautiful. Don’t believe her postcards. She is hideously ugly. Most people see her on stage. But on stage she is unrecognizable: white face, rouge, eye shadow, and someone else’s hair covering her face like a mask. It is the same at her concerts.
When she plays Margarita, this 27-year-old, wrinkled, lumbering woman with a nose covered in freckles looks like a slender, lovely, 17-year-old girl. On stage, she couldn’t look less like herself.
Should you want to see them, wangle an invitation to attend one of the banquets given in her honor or which she occasionally gives before leaving one capital for another. Obtaining such a privilege isn’t as easy as it might seem at first glance; only a select few merit the honor of her table… Those chosen include such gentlemen as critics; social climbers passing themselves off as critics, local singers, directors, bandleaders, music lovers and devotees with their hair slicked back over bald spots, theater habitués, and hangers-on who were invited thanks to their gold, silver or lineage. These banquets are not boring. They are quite interesting to an observer. Dining with them once or twice is worth it.
The famous among them (and there are many) eat and talk. Their poses are rather informal: neck turned one way, head the other and one elbow on the table. The older ones even pick their teeth.
The newspaper men grab the chairs closest to hers. They are almost all drunk, and their behavior is quite uninhibited as if they’ve known her forever. If they had just a bit more to drink, they’d be overly familiar. They make loud jokes, drink and interrupt each other (never forgetting to say “Pardon!”), make high-flown toasts and are clearly not afraid of making fools of themselves. Some gallantly heave themselves over the table to kiss her hand.
The so-called critics chat in a patronizing tone with the music lovers and devotees. The music lovers and devotees are silent. They are envious of the newspapermen, smiling beatifically and drinking only red wine, which is often especially good at the banquets.
She, the queen of the table, is dressed in a wardrobe that is modest but terribly expensive. A large diamond glitters on her neck under lacy chiffon. She wears a gargantuan unadorned bracelet on each wrist. Her hairstyle is highly controversial: ladies like it, men do not. Her face glows as she bestows a wide smile on all her fellow diners. She has the ability to smile at everyone all at once, to speak with everyone, to nod her head sweetly; her nods are for each person at the table. If you look at her face, you’d think she was sitting with a group of her closest and most beloved friends. At the end of the banquet, she gives some of them her postcards. Right at the table, on the back of the postcard she writes the name and surname of the lucky recipient and autographs it. She speaks French, naturally, and at the end of the meal, other languages. Her English and German are comically bad, but her dismal language skills sound sweet coming from her. Indeed, she is so sweet that for a long time you forget how hideously ugly she really is.
And him? He sits, le mari d’elle, five places from her, where he drinks a lot, eats a lot, and keeps silent a lot. He rolls the bread into little balls and rereads the labels on the bottles. As you look at this figure, you feel that he has nothing to do, that he’s bored, lazy and sick of it all.
He is extremely fair with bald streaks across the top of his head. Women, wine, sleepless nights and traipsing all over the world have furrowed his face, leaving deep wrinkles. He is about 35 years old, no more, but he looks older. His face seems to have been soaked in kvass. His eyes are fine but lazy. Once he was not so ghastly, but now he is. Bowed legs, sallow hands, a hairy neck. In Europe, for some reason, he acquired the nickname “pram” because of his crooked legs and strange gait. In his frock coat, he looks like a wet crow with a dry tail. The diners do not notice him. He returns the favor.
If you should be invited to a banquet, look at them, that husband and wife, observe them and tell me what brought and keeps these two people together.
Give them a single glance, and you’ll reply (more or less), like this:
That’s what everyone who sees them at a banquet thinks and says about them. They think and say that because they can’t get to the heart of the matter, so they judge by appearances. They regard her as a diva, and they avoid him like a leper covered in toad slime. But in reality, that European diva is tied to that toad by the most enviable and noble bond.
This is what he writes:
People ask why I love this witch. In truth, this woman is not worthy of love. And she isn’t worthy of hatred either. She ought to be paid no attention and her very existence ignored. To love her, you must either be me or insane — which is, at the end, one and the same thing.
She is not pretty. When I married her, she was hideously ugly, and now she’s even worse. She has no forehead. In place of eyebrows, she has two barely noticeable lines above her eyes. Instead of eyes, she had two shallow crevices. Nothing shines out of those crevices — not intelligence, not desire, not passion. She has a bulbous nose. Her mouth is small and pretty, but she has terrible teeth. She has no bust or waist. That last flaw is covered up prettily by her fiendish ability to lace herself up in a corset with extraordinary agility. She is short and stout. She is flabby. En masse, in all of her form there is one flaw that I consider the worst of all — a total absence of femininity. I do not consider skin pallor and physical weakness to be feminine, and in that, I do not share the views of a great many people. She is not a lady or a woman of fine breeding. She is a shopkeeper with a crude manner: when she walks, she waves her arms around; when she sits, she crosses her legs and rocks her whole body back and forth; when she lies down, she raises her legs, and so on.
She is slovenly. Her suitcases are a prime example of this: she tosses together clean underclothes with soiled ones, cuffs with shoes and my boots, new corsets with broken ones. We never receive anyone because our rooms are always disorderly and filthy. But why waste words? Just look at her at noon when she wakes up and lazily crawls out from under the covers, and you would never guess that she was the woman with the voice of a nightingale. Her hair unbrushed and wild, her eyes puffy with sleep, in a nightgown with torn shoulders, barefoot, cross-eyed surrounded by a cloud of yesterday’s tobacco smoke… Is that your notion of a nightingale?
She drinks. She drinks like a fish, whenever and whatever. She’s been drinking for a long time. If she didn’t drink, she’d be better than Adelina Patti, or at least no worse. She’s lost half her career because of her drinking and she’ll lose the other half soon enough. Some loathsome Germans taught her to drink beer and now she won’t go to sleep without drinking two or three bottles before bed. If she didn’t drink, she wouldn’t have dyspepsia.
She is impolite, which the students who sometimes invite her to their concerts can testify to.
She loves advertising. Advertisements cost us several thousand francs every year. I loathe advertising with all my being. No matter how expensive that silly advertisement is, it is always worth less than her voice. My wife likes to be flattered. Unless it is praise, she doesn’t like it when people tell the truth about her. For her, a Judas kiss that is paid for is preferable to honest criticism. She has no sense of dignity whatsoever.
She is intelligent, but her intelligence is not trained. Her mind lost its flexibility long ago. It is covered with fat and dormant.
She is capricious and fickle. She doesn’t have a single firm conviction. Yesterday she said that money means nothing, that it’s not the be all and end all, yet today she is giving concerts in four places because she developed the conviction that there is nothing on earth more important than money. Tomorrow she’ll say what she said yesterday. She doesn’t want news about her homeland, she has no political heroes, no favorite newspaper, no beloved writers.
She is rich but doesn’t help the poor. In fact, she often shortchanges milliners and hairdressers. She has no heart.
A deeply flawed woman from beginning to end.
But look at that witch when she is made-up, corseted and every hair in place as she approaches the footlights to begin her duel with nightingales and larks as they welcome the May dawn. Such dignity and such loveliness in her swan-like walk. Look at her and, I beg you, look carefully. When she first raises her hand and opens her mouth, those crevices are transformed into enormous eyes, glimmering with passion. Nowhere else will you find such magnificent eyes. When she, my wife, begins to sing, when the first trills fly about the air and I begin to feel my tumultuous soul quietening under the influence of those marvelous sounds, then look at my face and you will understand the secret of my love.
“Isn’t she magnificent?” I ask my neighbors.
They say, “Yes,” but that is not enough for me. I want to destroy anyone who might think that this extraordinary woman is not my wife. I forget everything that came before, and I live only in the present.
Do you see what a performer she is! How much profound meaning she puts into every one of her gestures! She understands everything: love, hatred, the human soul. It is no wonder that the theater thunders with applause.
After the last act, I escort her from the theater. She is pale, exhausted, having lived an entire life in one evening. I am also pale and fatigued. We get into the carriage and go to the hotel. In the hotel, without a word and fully dressed, she throws herself onto the bed. I sit silently on the edge of the bed and kiss her hand. That evening she doesn’t push me away. Together we fall asleep, we sleep until morning and wake up to curse one another…
Do you know when else I love her? When she is honoring balls or banquets. On those occasions, I love the fine actress in her. What an actress she must be to get around and overcome her own nature the way she does! I don’t recognize her at those silly banquets… she turns from a plucked chicken into a peacock.
This letter was written in a drunken, barely legible hand; in German and littered with spelling mistakes.
This is what she wrote:
You ask if I love that boy? Yes, sometimes. Why? God only knows.
He really is not handsome or likeable. Men like him are not born for requited love. Men like him can only buy love; they never get it for free. Judge for yourself.
He’s drunk as Lot day and night. His hands shake, which is very unattractive. When he is drunk, he gets angry and quarrels. He even hits me. When he is sober, he lies down on whatever is around and doesn’t say a thing.
He’s always very shabby although he has plenty of funds for clothing. Half of my earnings slip through his hands, who knows where.
I will never attempt to monitor him. Accountants are so very expensive for poor married artists. Husbands receive half the box office take for their work.
He doesn’t spend it on women — I know that. He is disdainful of women.
He is lazy. I have never seen him do anything. He drinks, eats and sleeps. And that’s all he does.
He never graduated from school. He was expelled from university for insolence in his first year.
He is not a nobleman. He is the very worst — a German.
I don’t like Germans. Ninety-nine out of a hundred Germans are idiots and the last one is a genius. I learned that from a prince, a German with some French blood.
He smokes repulsive tobacco.
But he does have some good qualities. He loves my noble art more than I do. Before a performance, if they announce that I can’t sing due to illness, that is, because I’ve given in to one of my whims, he stomps around like a living corpse and clenches his fists.
He is not a coward and not afraid of people. I love this quality most of all in people. I’ll tell you a little story from my life. It took place in Paris, a year after I had graduated from the Conservatoire. I was still very young and learning to drink. Every night I caroused as much as my youthful strength would allow. And, of course, I caroused in company. On one spree, as I was clinking glasses with my distinguished admirers, a very unattractive boy I didn’t know walked up to the table, looked me right in the eye and asked, “Why do you drink?”
We laughed. My boy wasn’t embarrassed.
The second question was more insolent and came straight from the heart.
“Why are you laughing? These blackguards pouring you glass after glass of wine won’t give you a sou when you ruin your voice from drink and lose all your money!”
Such audacity! My guests got very upset. I seated the boy next to me and ordered that he be served wine. It turned out that this temperance worker drinks wine very well indeed. A propos, I call him a boy only because he has a very small moustache.
I paid for his impudence by marrying him.
Most of the time he says nothing. When he speaks, it’s usually just one word. He says this word in a deep voice, with a catch in his throat and a facial tick. He might say the word when he is sitting with some people at a banquet or a ball. When someone — regardless of who it is — tells a lie, he raises his head, and without a glance and not the least bit at ill ease, he says:
“Untrue!”
That’s his favorite word. What woman could resist the glint in his eye when he says that word? I love that word. I love the way his eyes shine and his face twitches. Not just anyone can say that fine, bold word. But my husband says it everywhere and any time. I love him sometimes, and that “sometimes” — as far as I recall — coincides with his utterance of that fine word. But really, God only knows why I love him. I’m a bad psychologist, and in this case, I guess a psychological issue is involved…
 That letter was written in French in splendid, almost male handwriting. You won’t find a single grammatical error in it.