Chapter 22 twenty two

Four years have passed.I've just graduated from college, and I don't quite know what I should do, where to start, what kind of job I should take up, and right now I'm idle with nothing to do.One evening, in fine weather, I met Maidanov at the theater. He was married and had a job, but I could see no change in him.He was still so inexplicably elated by one moment, and so unexpectedly depressed by another. "You know," he said to me, "by the way, Mrs. Dolsky is here." "Which Mrs. Dolsky?" "Have you forgotten? It was the former Princess Zasekina, whom we all loved, including you. Do you remember that dacha near the Neskucciny Park?"

"She married Dolsky?" "Yes." "Is she here? In the theater?" "No, she's in Pittsburgh. She just got here a few days ago, and she's going abroad." "What kind of man is her husband?" I asked. "A very nice young man, very rich. A colleague of mine in Moscow. Do you know that since that incident ... you must have known all this well (Maydanov expressively) Smiling)... She managed to find a husband for herself; at last she found a home... But with her intelligence, everything is possible. Go to her, she sees you It will be delightful. She is more beautiful than ever."

Maidanov gave me Zinaida's address.She lives at the Demeus Hotel.Old memories flooded my mind... I decided to visit my former "lover" the next day.But something happened, and after a week's delay, and another week's delay, I finally went to the Dimeius Hotel, and when I asked Mrs. Dolsky, I learned that she had almost died four days ago. Died suddenly due to dystocia. It was as if something hit me inside of me.I could have seen her, but I didn't see her, and I would never see her again--this thought, this painful thought reproached me fiercely and irrefutably, deeply It hurts my heart. "She's dead!" I repeated, looking blankly at the porter, and walked slowly out of the hotel into the street, not knowing where I was going.All the past came to me at once.It turned out that the young, enthusiastic and brilliant life ended like this!Was this what she was eagerly and restlessly striving for?As I thought of it, I pictured that lovely face, those eyes, and that curl of hair now lying in a narrow coffin buried in the dark and dank ground. —here, not far from me who is still alive, and perhaps only a few steps from my father... I think about all this, I am absorbed in imagining, and at the same time I have her from that cold and indifferent mouth The bad news of death, I also listened to the news with indifference... ①These verses rang in my heart.Ah, youth!youth!You care for nothing, as if you had all the treasures of the universe, even sorrow comforts you, even sorrow works for you, you are confident and decisive, you say: Behold, I alone live!Your days are passing day by day, disappearing without leaving a trace, the number is too large to count.Everything about you is like wax and snow in the sun... slowly melting, and perhaps the whole secret of your charm is not that you can do everything, but that you can think that I can do everything:—and it is It's that each of us seriously thinks we're a waster, seriously thinks we have the right to say, "Oh, I can do anything if I don't waste my time!"

Take me, for one... did I expect anything when I finally sent away the phantom of my fleeting first love with only sighs and melancholy? Did I expect anything?Did I foresee any glorious future? How much of everything I wished for has come true?Now, when the shadow of dusk has begun to cover my life, what is more fresh and precious to me than the memory of the morning rain and spring thunder that is quickly fading? But why should I slander myself.I was not then, in the age of careless youth, deaf and indifferent to the mournful voice that called to me, the solemn voice from the grave.I remember that a few days after the day when I learned of Zinaïda's death, I volunteered, under an irresistible impulse, to mourn a poor old woman who lived with us in the same house. .She was covered in tatters and lay on a hard wooden board with a cloth bag under her head. It was very difficult and painful to die.All her life she struggled painfully with everyday life.She neither knew joy, nor tasted happiness—how could it be that she did not take pleasure in death, in deliverance and rest?But while the old woman's old body was still straining, her breast (with a cold hand on it) was still heaving in agony, and she hadn't lost the last of her strength,—she Still making the sign of the sign of the sign of the cross, still whispering, "God, forgive me my sins..." The expression of fear of death in her eyes faded only with the last sparks of consciousness dying out... ... I remember that right here, at the poor old woman's bedside, I was worried for Zinaïda, and I wanted to pray for her, for my father, and for myself.

1860 Translated by Cang Song