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Updated: June 4, 2025
And altogether she had a dull, despondent feeling and a conviction that her life was spoilt, and that there was no setting it right anyhow.... After dinner darkness came on. When Olga Ivanovna went into the drawing-room Korostelev was asleep on the sofa, with a gold-embroidered silk cushion under his head. "Khee-poo-ah," he snored "khee-poo-ah."
She thought only that from an idle whim, from self-indulgence, she had sullied herself all over from head to foot in something filthy, sticky, which one could never wash off.... "Oh, how fearfully false I've been!" she thought, recalling the troubled passion she had known with Ryabovsky. "Curse it all!..." At four o'clock she dined with Korostelev.
One of the doctors chanced to laugh at something, and the laugh had a strange and timid sound that made one's heart ac he. When Olga Ivanovna went into the drawing-room next time, Korostelev was not asleep, but sitting up and smoking. "He has diphtheria of the nasal cavity," he said in a low voice, "and the heart is not working properly now. Things are in a bad way, really."
"But you will send for Shrek?" said Olga Ivanovna. "He has been already. It was he noticed that the diphtheria had passed into the nose. What's the use of Shrek! Shrek's no use at all, really. He is Shrek, I am Korostelev, and nothing more." The time dragged on fearfully slowly. Olga Ivanovna lay down in her clothes on her bed, that had not been made all day, and sank into a doze.
Korostelev did not go home when his turn was over, but remained and wandered about the rooms like an uneasy spirit. The maid kept getting tea for the various doctors, and was constantly running to the chemist, and there was no one to do the rooms. There was a dismal stillness in the flat. Olga Ivanovna sat in her bedroom and thought that God was punishing her for having deceived her husband.
"Don't come in to me, but only come to the door that's right.... The day before yesterday I must have caught diphtheria at the hospital, and now... I am ill. Make haste and send for Korostelev."
Hunching up his shoulders and stretching his fingers wide apart, Korostelev played some chords and began singing in a tenor voice, "Show me the abode where the Russian peasant would not groan," while Dymov sighed once more, propped his head on his fist, and sank into thought. Olga Ivanovna had been extremely imprudent in her conduct of late.
As though his conscience was not clear, he could not look his wife straight in the face, did not smile with delight when he met her, and to avoid being left alone with her, he often brought in to dinner his colleague, Korostelev, a little close-cropped man with a wrinkled face, who kept buttoning and unbuttoning his reefer jacket with embarrassment when he talked with Olga Ivanovna, and then with his right hand nipped his left moustache.
Korostelev was standing near the study door, twisting his left moustache with his right hand. "Excuse me, I can't let you go in," he said surlily to Olga Ivanovna; "it's catching. Besides, it's no use, really; he is delirious, anyway." "Has he really got diphtheria?" Olga Ivanovna asked in a whisper.
She went to her bedroom and lay down on her bed; from jealousy, anger, a sense of humiliation and shame, she bit the pillow and began sobbing aloud. Dymov left Korostelev in the drawing-room, went into the bedroom, and with a desperate and embarrassed face said softly: "Don't cry so loud, little mother; there's no need. You must be quiet about it.
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