FullReads

I looked at him…. His face seemed familiar…. He too turned his eyes upon me…. Merciful heavens! it was Baburin! I took off my hat, went up to him, mentioned my name, and walked along beside him.

‘Whom are you burying?’ I asked.

‘Nikander Vavilitch Punin,’ he answered.

I felt, I knew beforehand, that he would utter that name, and yet it set my heart aching. I felt melancholy, and yet I was glad that chance had enabled me to pay my last respects to my old friend….

‘May I go with you, Paramon Semyonitch?’

‘You may…. I was following him alone; now there’ll be two of us.’

Our walk lasted more than an hour. My companion moved forward, without lifting his eyes or opening his lips. He had become quite an old man since I had seen him last; his deeply furrowed, copper-coloured face stood out sharply against his white hair. Signs of a life of toil and suffering, of continual struggle, could be seen in Baburin’s whole figure; want and poverty had worked cruel havoc with him. When everything was over, when what was Punin had disappeared for ever in the damp … yes, undoubtedly damp earth of the Smolensky cemetery, Baburin, after standing a couple of minutes with bowed, uncovered head before the newly risen mound of sandy clay, turned to me his emaciated, as it were embittered, face, his dry, sunken eyes, thanked me grimly, and was about to move away; but I detained him.

‘Where do you live, Paramon Semyonitch? Let me come and see you. I had no idea you were living in Petersburg. We could recall old days, and talk of our dead friend.’

Baburin did not answer me at once.

‘It’s two years since I found my way to Petersburg,’ he observed at last; ‘I live at the very end of the town. However, if you really care to visit me, come.’ He gave me his address. ‘Come in the evening; in the evening we are always at home … both of us.’

‘Both of you?’

‘I am married. My wife is not very well to-day, and that’s why she did not come too. Though, indeed, it’s quite enough for one person to go through this empty formality, this ceremony. As if anybody believed in it all!’

I was a little surprised at Baburin’s last words, but I said nothing, called a cab, and proposed to Baburin to take him home; but he refused.

* * * * *

The same day I went in the evening to see him. All the way there I was thinking of Punin. I recalled how I had met him the first time, and how ecstatic and amusing he was in those days; and afterwards in Moscow how subdued he had grown–especially the last time I saw him; and now he had made his last reckoning with life;–life is in grim earnest, it seems! Baburin was living in the Viborgsky quarter, in a little house which reminded me of the Moscow ‘nest’: the Petersburg abode was almost shabbier in appearance. When I went into his room he was sitting on a chair in a corner with his hands on his knees; a tallow candle, burning low, dimly lighted up his bowed, white head. He heard the sound of my footsteps, started up, and welcomed me more warmly than I had expected. A few moments later his wife came in; I recognised her at once as Musa–and only then understood why Baburin had invited me to come; he wanted to show me that he had after all come by his own.

Musa was greatly changed–in face, in voice, and in manners; but her eyes were changed most of all. In old times they had darted about like live creatures, those malicious, beautiful eyes; they had gleamed stealthily, but brilliantly; their glance had pierced, like a pin-prick…. Now they looked at one directly, calmly, steadily; their black centres had lost their lustre. ‘I am broken in, I am tame, I am good,’ her soft and dull gaze seemed to say. Her continued, submissive smile told the same story. And her dress, too, was subdued; brown, with little spots on it. She came up to me, asked me whether I knew her. She obviously felt no embarrassment, and not because she had lost a sense of shame or memory of the past, but simply because all petty self-consciousness had left her.