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Her Lover

by Maxim Gorky

An acquaintance of mine once told me the following story.

When I was a student at Moscow I happened to live alongside one of
those ladies whose repute is questionable. She was a Pole, and they
called her Teresa. She was a tallish, powerfully-built brunette, with
black, bushy eyebrows and a large coarse face as if carved out by a
hatchet—the bestial gleam of her dark eyes, her thick bass voice, her
cabman-like gait and her immense muscular vigour, worthy of a
fishwife, inspired me with horror. I lived on the top flight and her
garret was opposite to mine. I never left my door open when I knew her
to be at home. But this, after all, was a very rare occurrence.
Sometimes I chanced to meet her on the staircase or in the yard, and
she would smile upon me with a smile which seemed to me to be sly and
cynical. Occasionally, I saw her drunk, with bleary eyes, tousled
hair, and a particularly hideous grin. On such occasions she would
speak to me.

"How d'ye do, Mr. Student!" and her stupid laugh would still further
intensify my loathing of her. I should have liked to have changed my
quarters in order to have avoided such encounters and greetings; but
my little chamber was a nice one, and there was such a wide view from
the window, and it was always so quiet in the street below—so I
endured.

And one morning I was sprawling on my couch, trying to find some sort
of excuse for not attending my class, when the door opened, and the
bass voice of Teresa the loathsome resounded from my threshold:

"Good health to you, Mr. Student!"

"What do you want?" I said. I saw that her face was confused and
supplicatory... It was a very unusual sort of face for her.

"Sir! I want to beg a favour of you. Will you grant it me?"

I lay there silent, and thought to myself:

"Gracious!... Courage, my boy!"

"I want to send a letter home, that's what it is," she said; her voice
was beseeching, soft, timid.

"Deuce take you!" I thought; but up I jumped, sat down at my table,
took a sheet of paper, and said:

"Come here, sit down, and dictate!"

She came, sat down very gingerly on a chair, and looked at me with a
guilty look.

"Well, to whom do you want to write?"

"To Boleslav Kashput, at the town of Svieptziana, on the Warsaw
Road..."

"Well, fire away!"

"My dear Boles ... my darling ... my faithful lover. May the Mother of
God protect thee! Thou heart of gold, why hast thou not written for
such a long time to thy sorrowing little dove, Teresa?"

I very nearly burst out laughing. "A sorrowing little dove!" more than
five feet high, with fists a stone and more in weight, and as black a
face as if the little dove had lived all its life in a chimney, and
had never once washed itself! Restraining myself somehow, I asked:

"Who is this Bolest?"

"Boles, Mr. Student," she said, as if offended with me for blundering
over the name, "he is Boles—my young man."

"Young man!"

"Why are you so surprised, sir? Cannot I, a girl, have a young man?"

She? A girl? Well!

"Oh, why not?" I said. "All things are possible. And has he been your
young man long?"

"Six years."

"Oh, ho!" I thought. "Well, let us write your letter..."

And I tell you plainly that I would willingly have changed places with
this Boles if his fair correspondent had been not Teresa but something
less than she.

"I thank you most heartily, sir, for your kind services," said Teresa
to me, with a curtsey. "Perhaps I can show you some service, eh?"

"No, I most humbly thank you all the same."

"Perhaps, sir, your shirts or your trousers may want a little
mending?"

I felt that this mastodon in petticoats had made me grow quite red
with shame, and I told her pretty sharply that I had no need whatever
of her services.

She departed.

A week or two passed away. It was evening. I was sitting at my window
whistling and thinking of some expedient for enabling me to get away
from myself. I was bored; the weather was dirty. I didn't want to go
out, and out of sheer ennui I began a course of self-analysis and
reflection. This also was dull enough work, but I didn't care about
doing anything else. Then the door opened. Heaven be praised! Some one
came in.

"Oh, Mr. Student, you have no pressing business, I hope?"

It was Teresa. Humph!

"No. What is it?"

"I was going to ask you, sir, to write me another letter."

"Very well! To Boles, eh?"

"No, this time it is from him."

"Wha-at?"

"Stupid that I am! It is not for me, Mr. Student, I beg your pardon.
It is for a friend of mine, that is to say, not a friend but an
acquaintance—a man acquaintance. He has a sweetheart just like me
here, Teresa. That's how it is. Will you, sir, write a letter to this
Teresa?"

I looked at her—her face was troubled, her fingers were trembling. I
was a bit fogged at first—and then I guessed how it was.

"Look here, my lady," I said, "there are no Boleses or Teresas at all,
and you've been telling me a pack of lies. Don't you come sneaking
about me any longer. I have no wish whatever to cultivate your
acquaintance. Do you understand?"

And suddenly she grew strangely terrified and distraught; she began to
shift from foot to foot without moving from the place, and spluttered
comically, as if she wanted to say something and couldn't. I waited to
see what would come of all this, and I saw and felt that, apparently,
I had made a great mistake in suspecting her of wishing to draw me
from the path of righteousness. It was evidently something very
different.

"Mr. Student!" she began, and suddenly, waving her hand, she turned
abruptly towards the door and went out. I remained with a very
unpleasant feeling in my mind. I listened. Her door was flung
violently to—plainly the poor wench was very angry... I thought it
over, and resolved to go to her, and, inviting her to come in here,
write everything she wanted.

I entered her apartment. I looked round. She was sitting at the table,
leaning on her elbows, with her head in her hands.

"Listen to me," I said.

Now, whenever I come to this point in my story, I always feel horribly
awkward and idiotic. Well, well!

"Listen to me," I said.

She leaped from her seat, came towards me with flashing eyes, and
laying her hands on my shoulders, began to whisper, or rather to hum
in her peculiar bass voice:

"Look you, now! It's like this. There's no Boles at all, and there's
no Teresa either. But what's that to you? Is it a hard thing for you
to draw your pen over paper? Eh? Ah, and you, too! Still such a
little fair-haired boy! There's nobody at all, neither Boles, nor
Teresa, only me. There you have it, and much good may it do you!"

"Pardon me!" said I, altogether flabbergasted by such a reception,
"what is it all about? There's no Boles, you say?"

"No. So it is."

"And no Teresa either?"

"And no Teresa. I'm Teresa."

I didn't understand it at all. I fixed my eyes upon her, and tried to
make out which of us was taking leave of his or her senses. But she
went again to the table, searched about for something, came back to
me, and said in an offended tone:

"If it was so hard for you to write to Boles, look, there's your
letter, take it! Others will write for me."

I looked. In her hand was my letter to Boles. Phew!

"Listen, Teresa! What is the meaning of all this? Why must you get
others to write for you when I have already written it, and you
haven't sent it?"

"Sent it where?"

"Why, to this—Boles."

"There's no such person."

I absolutely did not understand it. There was nothing for me but to
spit and go. Then she explained.

"What is it?" she said, still offended. "There's no such person, I
tell you," and she extended her arms as if she herself did not
understand why there should be no such person. "But I wanted him to
be... Am I then not a human creature like the rest of them? Yes, yes,
I know, I know, of course... Yet no harm was done to any one by my
writing to him that I can see..."

"Pardon me—to whom?"

"To Boles, of course."

"But he doesn't exist."

"Alas! alas! But what if he doesn't? He doesn't exist, but he might!
I write to him, and it looks as if he did exist. And Teresa—that's
me, and he replies to me, and then I write to him again..."

I understood at last. And I felt so sick, so miserable, so ashamed,
somehow. Alongside of me, not three yards away, lived a human creature
who had nobody in the world to treat her kindly, affectionately, and
this human being had invented a friend for herself!

"Look, now! you wrote me a letter to Boles, and I gave it to some one
else to read it to me; and when they read it to me I listened and
fancied that Boles was there. And I asked you to write me a letter
from Boles to Teresa—that is to me. When they write such a letter for
me, and read it to me, I feel quite sure that Boles is there. And life
grows easier for me in consequence."

"Deuce take you for a blockhead!" said I to myself when I heard this.

And from thenceforth, regularly, twice a week, I wrote a letter to
Boles, and an answer from Boles to Teresa. I wrote those answers
well... She, of course, listened to them, and wept like anything,
roared, I should say, with her bass voice. And in return for my thus
moving her to tears by real letters from the imaginary Boles, she
began to mend the holes I had in my socks, shirts, and other articles
of clothing. Subsequently, about three months after this history
began, they put her in prison for something or other. No doubt by this
time she is dead.

My acquaintance shook the ash from his cigarette, looked pensively up
at the sky, and thus concluded:

Well, well, the more a human creature has tasted of bitter things the
more it hungers after the sweet things of life. And we, wrapped round
in the rags of our virtues, and regarding others through the mist of
our self-sufficiency, and persuaded of our universal impeccability, do
not understand this.

And the whole thing turns out pretty stupidly—and very cruelly. The
fallen classes, we say. And who are the fallen classes, I should like
to know? They are, first of all, people with the same bones, flesh,
and blood and nerves as ourselves. We have been told this day after
day for ages. And we actually listen—and the devil only knows how
hideous the whole thing is. Or are we completely depraved by the loud
sermonising of humanism? In reality, we also are fallen folks, and, so
far as I can see, very deeply fallen into the abyss of
self-sufficiency and the conviction of our own superiority. But enough
of this. It is all as old as the hills—so old that it is a shame to
speak of it. Very old indeed—yes, that's what it is!