A Desperate Character and Other Stories

by Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev

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.

Musa talked a great deal about Punin, talked in an even voice, which too had lost its fire. I learned that of late years he had become very feeble, had almost sunk into childishness, so much so that he was miserable if he had not toys to play with; they persuaded him, it is true, that he made them out of waste stuff for sale ... but he really played with them himself. His passion for poetry, however, never died out, and he kept his memory for nothing but verses; a few days before his death he recited a passage from the Rossiad; but Pushkin he feared, as children fear bogies. His devotion to Baburin had also remained undiminished; he worshipped him as much as ever, and even at the last, wrapped about by the chill and dark of the end, he had faltered with halting tongue, ‘benefactor!’ I learned also from Musa that soon after the Moscow episode, it had been Baburin’s fate once more to wander all over Russia, continually tossed from one private situation to another; that in Petersburg, too, he had been again in a situation, in a private business, which situation he had, however, been obliged to leave a few days before, owing to some unpleasantness with his employer: Baburin had ventured to stand up for the workpeople.... The invariable smile, with which Musa accompanied her words, set me musing mournfully; it put the finishing touch to the impression made on me by her husband’s appearance. They had hard work, the two of them, to make a bare living—there was no doubt of it. He took very little part in our conversation; he seemed more preoccupied than grieved.... Something was worrying him.

‘Paramon Semyonitch, come here,’ said the cook, suddenly appearing in the doorway.

‘What is it? what’s wanted?’ he asked in alarm.

‘Come here,’ the cook repeated insistently and meaningly. Baburin buttoned up his coat and went out.

When I was left alone with Musa, she looked at me with a somewhat changed glance, and observed in a voice which was also changed, and with no smile: ‘I don’t know, Piotr Petrovitch, what you think of me now, but I dare say you remember what I used to be.... I was self-confident, light-hearted ... and not good; I wanted to live for my own pleasure. But I want to tell you this: when I was abandoned, and was like one lost, and was only waiting for God to take me, or to pluck up spirit to make an end of myself,—once more, just as in Voronezh, I met with Paramon Semyonitch—and he saved me once again.... Not a word that could wound me did I hear from him, not a word of reproach; he asked nothing of me—I was not worthy of that; but he loved me ... and I became his wife. What was I to do? I had failed of dying; and I could not live either after my own choice....What was I to do with myself? Even so—it was a mercy to be thankful for. That is all.’

She ceased, turned away for an instant ... the same submissive smile came back to her lips. ‘Whether life’s easy for me, you needn’t ask,’ was the meaning I fancied now in that smile.

The conversation passed to ordinary subjects. Musa told me that Punin had left a cat that he had been very fond of, and that ever since his death she had gone up to the attic and stayed there, mewing incessantly, as though she were calling some one ... the neighbours were very much scared, and fancied that it was Punin’s soul that had passed into the cat.

‘Paramon Semyonitch is worried about something,’ I said at last.