Selected Stories of Anton Chekov - By Anton Chekhov Page 0,57

that tomorrow the night will be just as long and colorless, and the night after …

In the corridor it strikes five o’clock, six, seven … It’s getting dark.

There’s a dull pain in my cheek—the tic is beginning. To occupy myself with thoughts, I put myself in my former point of view, when I was not indifferent, and ask: why am I, a famous man, a privy councillor, sitting in this small hotel room, on this bed with its strange gray blanket? Why am I looking at this cheap tin washbasin and listening to the trashy clock clanking in the corridor? Can all this be worthy of my fame and my high station among people? And my response to these questions is a smile. The naïveté with which, in my youth, I exaggerated the importance of renown and the exclusive position celebrities supposedly enjoy, strikes me as ridiculous. I’m well known, my name is spoken with awe, my portrait has been published in Niva and World Illustrated,26 I’ve even read my own biography in a certain German magazine—and what of it? I’m sitting all alone in a strange town, on a strange bed, rubbing my aching cheek with my palm … Family squabbles, merciless creditors, rude railway workers, the inconvenience of the passport system,27 expensive and unwholesome food in the buffets, universal ignorance and rudeness of behavior—all that and many other things it would take too long to enumerate, concern me no less than any tradesman known only in the lane where he lives. How, then, does the exclusiveness of my position manifest itself? Suppose I’m famous a thousand times over, that I’m a hero and the pride of my motherland; all the newspapers publish bulletins about my illness, expressions of sympathy come to me by mail from colleagues, students, the public; but all that will not prevent me from dying in a strange bed, in anguish, in utter solitude … No one’s to blame for that, of course, but, sinner that I am, I dislike my popular name. It seems to me that it has betrayed me.

Around ten o’clock I fall asleep and, despite my tic, sleep soundly and would go on sleeping for a long time if no one woke me up. Shortly after one o’clock there is a sudden knock at the door.

“Who’s there?”

“Telegram!”

“You might have brought it tomorrow,” I grumble as I take the telegram from the servant. “Now I won’t fall back to sleep.”

“Sorry, sir. You had a light burning, I thought you weren’t asleep.”

I open the telegram and look at the signature first: from my wife. What does she want?

“Yesterday Gnekker and Liza secretly married. Come back.”

I read this telegram and am frightened for a moment. What frightens me is not what Gnekker and Liza have done, but the indifference with which I receive the news of their marriage. They say philosophers and wise men are indifferent. Wrong. Indifference is a paralysis of the soul, a premature death.

I lie down in bed again and begin inventing thoughts to occupy myself with. What to think about? It seems everything has already been thought through, and there’s nothing now that is capable of stirring my mind.

When dawn comes I’m sitting in bed with my arms around my knees and, since I have nothing to do, am trying to know myself. “Know yourself”28—what splendid and useful advice; too bad the ancients never thought of showing how to use this advice.

Formerly, when I would feel a desire to understand someone, or myself, I would take into consideration not actions, in which everything is relative, but wishes. Tell me what you want and I’ll tell you who you are.

And now I examine myself: what do I want?

I want our wives, children, friends, and students to love in us not the name, not the brand or label, but the ordinary person. What else? I’d like to have helpers and heirs. What else? I’d like to wake up in a hundred years and have at least a glimpse of what’s happened with science. I’d like to live another ten years or so … And what more?

Nothing more. I think, I think for a long time, and can’t think up anything else. And however much I think, however widely my thought ranges, it’s clear to me that my wishes lack some chief thing, some very important thing. In my predilection for science, in my wish to live, in this sitting on a strange bed and trying to know myself, in all the thoughts,