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.