'S STORY

IN the year in which my story begins I had a job at a little station on
one of our southwestern railways. Whether I had a gay or a dull life
at the station you can judge from the fact that for fifteen miles
round there was not one human habitation, not one woman, not one decent
tavern; and in those days I was young, strong, hot-headed, giddy, and
foolish. The only distraction I could possibly find was in the windows
of the passenger trains, and in the vile vodka which the Jews drugged
with thorn-apple. Sometimes there would be a glimpse of a woman's
head at a carriage window, and one would stand like a statue without
breathing and stare at it until the train turned into an almost
invisible speck; or one would drink all one could of the loathsome vodka
till one was stupefied and did not feel the passing of the long hours
and days. Upon me, a native of the north, the steppe produced the
effect of a deserted Tatar cemetery. In the summer the steppe with its
solemn calm, the monotonous chur of the grasshoppers, the transparent
moonlight from which one could not hide, reduced me to listless
melancholy; and in the winter the irreproachable whiteness of the
steppe, its cold distance, long nights, and howling wolves oppressed me
like a heavy nightmare. There were several people living at the
station: my wife and I, a deaf and scrofulous telegraph clerk, and three
watchmen. My assistant, a young man who was in consumption, used to go
for treatment to the town, where he stayed for months at a time, leaving
his duties to me together with the right of pocketing his salary. I had
no children, no cake would have tempted visitors to come and see me, and
I could only visit other officials on the line, and that no oftener than
once a month.

I remember my wife and I saw the New Year in. We sat at table, chewed
lazily, and heard the deaf telegraph clerk monotonously tapping on his
apparatus in the next room. I had already drunk five glasses of
drugged vodka, and, propping my heavy head on my fist, thought of my
overpowering boredom from which there was no escape, while my wife sat
beside me and did not take her eyes off me. She looked at me as no
one can look but a woman who has nothing in this world but a handsome
husband. She loved me madly, slavishly, and not merely my good looks,
or my soul, but my sins, my ill-humor and boredom, and even my cruelty
when, in drunken fury, not knowing how to vent my ill-humor, I tormented