Around
Her
by Bruce Costello
Agafya
hears a knocking and through drowsy eyes watches her shrivelled granny leave the
table and shuffle to the door of the hut. A familiar figure stands there,
silhouetted against the sunlight that floods into the gloom.
Doctor
Chekhov enters, greets Granny, goes to the bench where Agafya is lying, and
bends to ask how she is feeling.
“So
tired. Just awful all over. Can’t do anything.”
“Let
me take a look.”
His
hands, twice the size of hers, are warm and soft. He has beautiful eyes. So
brown with good-natured wrinkles at the corners. And the whites of his eyes
under the funny glasses are bright and clear, like the full moon on a frosty
night. They say he writes stories, grows flowers and loves all animals,
especially dogs. He doctors to peasants without being paid.
“Well,
it’s not typhus,” Dr Chekhov says, with a smile. “And your vital organs are in
good shape. It’s your nerves playing up again, same as last time. What we call
melancholia. And little wonder.”
He
looks around the hut. Agafya sees him staring at Granny, who has returned to
the table, on which a half-eaten loaf of black bread is crawling with
cockroaches.
“Really,
Babushka,” the doctor says. “You must not allow vermin to contaminate the food.
That’s how disease spreads.”
“Yes,
Sir.”
He
grunts, then pulls over a stool and sits close to Agafya. He takes her hand.
She gazes into his face.
It’s
as if she’s always known him. He makes her feel so special. Like he knows
everything about her, but still cares. He asks nothing from her, and she knows
he never will. Yes, he cares, loves, but not in the way other men do.
His
nearness embraces the young woman like a sheepskin coat placed over a sleeping
child. Like a child, she wants to touch his little beard with her fingers, but
instead smiles up at him with big, blue eyes.
“Well,
Agafya, I’d like to ask a few questions.” He squeezes her hand. “Remind me, how
old are you?”
“Twenty-four.”
“Still
working at the cotton factory?”
“No.
Got worked silly every day ‘cept Holy Days, yelled at, paid hardly nothing. I
done seven years of it. Now Father makes me work in the fields. It’s real hard,
but at least fields don’t stink of chemicals that make you chuck up.”
The
doctor nods, frowning. “What’s it like with your husband away in the army?”
“He’s
only got another eighteen years to go.” Agafya giggles, and then glances
towards her grandmother who is muttering under her breath, picking cockroaches
from the bread and dropping them on the dirt floor.
“Agafya,
what is it like for you?
“It’s
alright, I suppose. Do you really wanna know?”
“I’d
like you to tell me.” He tilts his head in a listening stance, like a thrush.
Agafya
sits up, leans towards him and whispers: “He got drunk every Holy Day and beat
the devil outta me. It’s a sin to say, but I’m glad he got called up. It was
wrong what he done. There oughta be a law against it.”
“Yes,”
agrees the doctor. “Maybe there will be, sometime in the future. And perhaps
one day there’ll be honest policemen and judges.” He raises an eyebrow. “Tell
me, Agafya. Are you still doing lots of reading?”
“When
I get time.”
“It
was marvellous how you taught yourself to read, with just a little help from
the priest.”
“It’s
the only thing I like doing. But it
makes me unhappy.”
“Mmm?”
Agafya
glances again at her grandmother.
Still
whispering, she tells the doctor about her friend Fyodor Fyodorovich, the priest’s
son, of their evening walks in the countryside, the things he’d spoken about,
like the secret meetings he attended, police spies everywhere and a place
called Siberia where people get sent.
“Fyodor
gave me a story I hated, but I read it, over and over again.”
“Oh?”
Agafya’s
eyes fill with tears.
“What
was the story called, do you remember?” the doctor asks.
“Muzhiki.”
“Oh,
yes. About the lives of peasants.” Dr Chekhov strokes his beard. “Do you
remember who wrote it?”
“No.
Fyodor found the story in some magazine and copied it out, just before he got
took away by the secret police.”
“And
you hated the story but kept reading it? Can you explain what you mean, please?”
“Well,
I dunno what I mean. I dunno what I’m meant to think.”
The
doctor smiles. “I’d like to hear what you do think.”
“I’m
not sure.”
“Something
about Muzhiki made you feel upset?”
Agafya
falls silent for a while. “I think I was sad before I started reading it, just
didn’t know that I was, thought it was just the way things was. Then reading
made me see things different.”
“Uhuh.”
“It’s
like ...when you open the hut door, the sun shines in, and you suddenly see the
cockroaches on the walls and the rat shit on the table.”
“Quite
so.”
“And
it’s like, when you’ve been in the meadow, sniffing wild flowers and listening
to nightingales, you come home to the hut - and the stink of vodka and stove
smoke hits you like an axe, and your sister’s husband’s drunk and beating her
up, and she’s only got one front tooth, and Granddad’s sitting over the stove
with legs like sticks, coughing blood, shouting at everybody to shut up and you
know he’s gonna die soon and nobody cares. One less mouth to feed. And you’d
seen all this before but never seen it for real. Then the tax man marches in
with the policeman and the samovar gets took away because your family’s got no
money for taxes.”
“Holy
Mother of God!” Granny pushes her chair back, raising a little cloud of dust
from the floor. “What sort of talk is this?” She throws up her hands. “It’s a
sin to talk like that! God have mercy on her soul and save her from burning in
hell!”
“Oh,
Granny!” Agafya cries out. “You might think it’s a sin, but it’s God’s truth
I’m talking.”
“Shut
your foul mouth. When your father hears the filth I’ve heard crossing your
lips, he’ll skin you alive! Holy Mother of God!”
“Madam,”
says Dr Chekhov quietly, “if you reveal something that you have overheard a
patient saying in confidence to her doctor, it’s you that will go straight to
hell.”
Granny’s
face goes white. She collapses back onto her chair and seems to shrink into
herself.
“I
didn’t mean nothing, your Excellency.”
“I
should think not.”
“I
only wanna help her. Her father says she’s out of her mind. Can’t you give her
medicine to fix her brain?”
Dr
Chekhov shakes his head. “It’s not that simple. The problem’s not in her but around
her.”
He
turns to Agafya. “Why don’t you hop back to bed and get some sleep? I have to
go now, but I’ll drop by in a day or two.” He stops in the doorway to give her
a little wave and a big smile.
Silence
descends on the hut, broken by the sound of a blowfly, trapped in a spider’s
web. It extricates itself and careers around the room, then crash lands, spinning
upside down on the table in front of Granny, who appears not to notice.
The
door bursts open and Agafya’s father enters, a tall, black-bearded man in a
sheepskin coat. He glares at Agafya through drunken red eyes.
“You
oughta be ashamed of yourself, lazing all day,” he bellows, “making out you’re
sick!”
“The
doctor said there’s nothing wrong with the lying little wench,” says Granny.
Father
towers over Agafya, fists drawn back, and then leans down, lowering his face
till their noses almost touch.
“Up
at dawn tomorrow and into the fields!”
“Yes,
Father.”
He
spits on the floor, swears, slumps onto a bench and starts to snore.
Agafya
stands, throws on a shawl, and goes into the garden to answer a call of nature.
She thinks about Dr Chekhov, and how nice he is with her, and how different she
feels inside herself after he’s visited. She struggles to find words to
describe this, but none come to mind. Perhaps some feelings don’t have their
own words, she muses.
Her
thoughts turn to Fyodor Fyodorovich, wherever he is. She says a prayer for him and
recalls the strange things he’d spoken of – the coming revolution, police spies
and that place called Siberia. And secret plans for city students to come to
the villages to distribute pamphlets to peasants, who would need people like
her to help them to read and understand.
A
hawk rises from a field and floats low over Agafya’s squatting figure, then
lets out a cry, as if it knows what she is thinking, and flies towards the
horizon where a dark cloud shaped like a broken sickle is tinged with red and
gold in the last rays of the sun.
“Around Her”
was originally published in Fiction on the Web on August
10, 2020.
