Selected Stories of Anton Chekov - By Anton Chekhov Page 0,137

fight off his sleepiness. He slept. Then that same night, as you heard, Judas kissed Jesus and betrayed him to the executioners. He was bound and led to the high priest, and was beaten, and Peter, exhausted, suffering in sorrow and anguish, you see, not having had enough sleep, sensing that something terrible was about to happen on earth, followed after him … He loved Jesus passionately, to distraction, and now from afar he saw how they beat him …”

Lukerya abandoned the spoons and turned her fixed gaze on the student.

“They came to the high priest,” he went on, “Jesus was questioned, and the servants meanwhile made a fire in the courtyard, because it was cold, and they warmed themselves. Peter stood by the fire with them and also warmed himself, as I’m doing now. A woman saw him and said: ‘This man was also with Jesus,’ meaning that he, too, should be taken and questioned. And all the servants who were by the fire must have looked at him suspiciously and sternly, because he became confused and said: ‘I do not know the man.’ A little later someone again recognized him as one of Jesus’ disciples and said: ‘You are one of them.’ But he denied it again. And a third time someone turned to him: ‘Did I not see you today in the garden with him?’ A third time he denied it. And right after that the cock crowed, and Peter, looking at Jesus from afar, remembered the word he had said to him at the supper … Remembered, recovered, went out of the courtyard, and wept bitterly. The Gospel says: And he went out, and wept bitterly’ I picture it: a very, very silent and dark garden, and, barely heard in the silence, a muffled sobbing …”

The student sighed and fell to thinking. Still smiling, Vasilisa suddenly choked, and big, abundant tears rolled down her cheeks. She shielded her face from the fire with her sleeve, as if ashamed of her tears, and Lukerya, gazing fixedly at the student, flushed, and her expression became heavy, strained, as in someone who is trying to suppress intense pain.

The laborers were coming back from the river, and one of them, on horseback, was already close, and the light of the fire wavered on him. The student wished the widows good night and went on. And again it was dark, and his hands were cold. A cruel wind was blowing, and winter was indeed coming back, and it did not seem that in two days it would be Easter.

Now the student was thinking about Vasilisa: if she wept, it meant that everything that had happened with Peter on that dreadful night had some relation to her …

He looked back. The solitary fire flickered peacefully in the darkness, and the people around it could no longer be seen. The student thought again that if Vasilisa wept and her daughter was troubled, then obviously what he had just told them, something that had taken place nineteen centuries ago, had a relation to the present—to both women, and probably to this desolate village, to himself, to all people. If the old woman wept, it was not because he was able to tell it movingly, but because Peter was close to her and she was interested with her whole being in what had happened in Peter’s soul.

And joy suddenly stirred in his soul, and he even stopped for a moment to catch his breath. The past, he thought, is connected with the present in an unbroken chain of events flowing one out of the other. And it seemed to him that he had just seen both ends of that chain: he touched one end, and the other moved.

And when he crossed the river on the ferry, and then, going up the hill, looked at his native village and to the west, where a narrow strip of cold, crimson sunset shone, he kept thinking how the truth and beauty that had guided human life there in the garden and in the high priest’s courtyard, went on unbroken to this day and evidently had always been the main thing in human life and generally on earth; and a feeling of youth, health, strength—he was only twenty-two—and an inexpressibly sweet anticipation of happiness, an unknown, mysterious happiness, gradually came over him, and life seemed to him delightful, wondrous, and filled with lofty meaning.

APRIL 1894

ANNA ON THE NECK

I

After the wedding there was not even a light snack; the newly-weds