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.
