In The Cart by Anton Chekhov, 1897

I’m reading In The Cart aka The Schoolmistress, written by Anton Chekhov in 1897. I’m reading In The Cart because in A Swim In A Pond In The Rain George Saunders is telling me to. I’m reading In The Cart as mentioned in A Swim In A Pond In The Rain because Kyle recommended Saunders to me. I’m reading In The Cart during A Swim In A Pond In The Rain because I want to write better.

Or… I was.
Now I’m writing rubbish on the internet.
It’s 11pm and I’ve only read 19 pages.
Kyle and Avvai have gone to bed.
I think they’re ever so slightly worried about me.
Maybe I should be worried about me, but I’m too busy thinking about the doorbell.
Since landing in Vancouver 12 days ago, from somewhere deep within this apartment building, there has been the faintest ding, dong of an electronic door bell, and it is winding Kyle and I up like clockwork (probably it was ringing before we arrived too but I didn’t care then). It is intermittent but unrelenting, never a matter of if, only of when. My whole being has been reduced to anticipating the next ring.

Anyway, if you would also like to read In The Cart, I’ve included it at the end of the page. It is a short story. The version I have is called The Schoolmistress. I think it’s the same story… *shrugs in Russian*

It begins, “At half-past eight they drove out of the town.” Honestly I can’t tell whether or not that’s a good opening, hopefully George will tell me. I mean, it feels strong, it’s intriguing, I have the feeling of having been transported somewhere — though I don’t yet know where — but maybe I only feel that because I’ve been told this is a very good story™. If this were an unknown author, would I care?

It continues,

At half-past eight they drove out of the town.
The high road was dry, a lovely April sun was shining warmly, but the snow was still lying in the ditches and in the woods. Winter, dark, long, and spiteful, was hardly over; spring had come all of a sudden. But neither the warmth nor the languid transparent woods, warmed by the breath of spring, nor the black flocks of birds flying over the huge puddles that were like lakes, nor the marvelous fathomless sky, into which it seemed one would have gone away so joyfully, presented anything new or interesting to Marya Vassilyevna who was sitting in the cart. For thirteen years she had been schoolmistress, and there was no reckoning how many times during all those years she had been to the town for her salary; and whether it were spring as now, or a rainy autumn evening, or winter, it was all the same to her, and she always—invariably—longed for one thing only, to get to the end of her journey as quickly as could be.
— Anton Chekov, In The Cart, 1897, Russkiye Vedomosti

By the end of that first paragraph any doubt is gone, I have been transported! Then ADHD. I’m reading wikipedia.

In terms of artfulness, superb, but he becomes didactic when trying to give meaning to it.
— Leo Tolstoy, from his diary, 21 December 1897

Leo wrote that the same day it was published! Dude was keen!

Now I’m looking up what didactic means…

didactic

Intended to teach, especially in a way that is too determined or eager, and often fixed and unwilling to change.

Okay, so Leo thinks it sounds nice but it doesn’t hold up. I don’t know what to think yet, I’ve only read one paragraph.

Avvai thinks Kyle and I are being obsessive and over-dramatic about the doorbell. I didn’t think we were, but then Kyle made a very unconvincing rebuttal to Avvai’s concerns and in the process he convinced me that we are in fact obsessed.

No time to dwell on that though. The first good lead was The Convenience Store Theory wherein I thought the sound might be the open door chime of the convenience store below the apartment. ‘First’ because I’ve forgotten the one before that, and ‘good’ because it was before we all got very jaded about ever figuring out where the flippin’ doorbell is. Back when things could still be good.

Avvai and I investigated the convenience store on the way back from a free pizza party a talk on data-journalism at a university that sounds made-up. By investigated I mean I opened the door, heard no chime, and backed out while giving the cashier — who probably thought I was insane — that particular kind of awkward smile that is usually reserved for bumping into someone we vaguely knew in schools’ mum at the supermarket, the kind of encounter that makes you wish you’d moved to a different city years ago. I then proceed to walk past the window while holding eye-contact with him. (The eye-contact may not have been necessary)

Okay, back to live-blogging a woman in a cart.

The imagery is ‘strong’ (why does strong sound weak when I say it?), the contrast of a beautifully described scene and Marya’s boredom, her feeling of having “been living in that part of the country for ages and ages, for a hundred years” is vivid, artful,

She had got out of the habit of thinking of her past before she became a schoolmistress, and had almost forgotten it. She had once had a father and mother; they had lived in Moscow in a big flat near the Red Gate, but of all that life there was left in her memory only something vague and fluid like a dream. Her father had died when she was ten years old, and her mother had died soon after… She had a brother, an officer; at first they used to write to each other, then her brother had given up answering her letters, he had got out of the way of writing. Of her old belongings, all that was left was a photograph of her mother, but it had grown dim from the dampness of the school, and now nothing could be seen but the hair and the eyebrows.
— Anton Chekov, In The Cart, 1897, Russkiye Vedomosti

The loss of memory, the loss of family, the loss of everything once owned — everything’s shit but it sounds really beautiful (except the ding dong, which obviously does not sound beautiful). Top marks. And we’re well into aha! territory — the feeling — that awful exquisite ache that is the other side of beauty. I read something beautiful and all of a sudden I’m reminded of how little I will read in my life and I hate it. And then I console myself with all the things I’m so grateful to have read and I love it again. This is really good. I still don’t know why this is good though, need George for that.

Avvai’s final contribution on the case — before herself backing away and laughing from the other side of The Room (Tommy Wiseau, 2003) — was to suggest that maybe it was some kind of pager system for someone in the building who makes deliveries for ÜbermenschEats.

I can’t remember why we think it’s not that, but Avvai has abandoned us now,

[she] merely laughed, and apparently it was all the same to [her], and [she] asked nothing better of life. [She] was kind, gentle, naïve; [she] had no grasp of this coarse life, [she] did not know [what it is to be held hostage by a doorbell.]
— Marya describing Hanov me, despairing at the unfairness of it all, of the care-free experience of the neuro-typical, of the Avvai’s of the world

Kyle suggested it might be a special bell for delivery people at the lobby; I wondered if it was the door chime from the liquor store (wait… is that my only contribution… just slight variations on A Bell In A Door In The Shop?… shit); Kyle felt sure he’d cracked the case wide open with The Crosswalk Theory. Standing beside the crosswalk, staring up at unmarked boxes on power poles, realising there isn’t even a button, that no even approximately similar sound emanates, we start to feel that maybe the case has cracked us.

Before I know it I’m actually inside the convenience store, and now even I think I sound like a crazy person. I hear myself telling the older Turkish woman at the desk that I live in the apartment upstairs, that I’ve been hearing a very faint, intermittent ringing sound that is slowly driving me insane, and does she know anything about it? Has she also heard this sound? She looks alarmed, she doesn’t know anything about any ringing — except maybe the thought of ringing the police — then for some reason she says “thank you” and I will myself to just cringe out of existence.

Now we’re introduced to Hanov, “a man of about forty, with a worn face and a lifeless expression”. Very cringe.

He lived alone on his large estate, was not in the service, and it was said of him that he did nothing at home but pace from one end of the room to the other, whistling, or play chess with his old footman [driven to madness by the incessant ringing of an unknown bell].

But why are Kyle and I so affected? The c-section theory is out (we’re one of each), so that leaves only… ADHD!

George agrees,

the mind can be two places at once. (Many trains are running simultaneously in there, consciousness aware of only one at a time.)
— George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, 2021, Random House, Ch. Thoughts on “In The Cart”, p. 27

Okay I’m not sure if that really supports what I’m getting at but basically, the ringing of the bell feels like the first-world version of what we always called Chinese Water Torture as kids, where an intermittent drip of water is trained on your immobilised head, and you go mad anticipating when the next drip will come.

The ‘Chinese’ in that is no doubt apocryphal, much like the Chinese burn, or Chinese whispers, but we were kids, we didn’t know any better. And now we’re adults, and we still don’t know any better. Probably Kitchener invented it and then blamed it on the most distant foreigners he could think of.

Beside old Semyon he looked graceful and vigorous, but yet in his walk there was something just perceptible which betrayed in him a being already touched by decay, weak, and on the road to ruin. And all at once there was a whiff of spirits in the wood. Marya Vassilyevna was filled with dread and pity for this man going to his ruin for no visible cause or reason, and it came into her mind that if she had been his wife or sister she would have devoted her whole life to saving him from ruin.
— Anton Chekov, In The Cart, 1897, Russkiye Vedomosti

So she thinks he’s a loser but she wants to marry him, “devote her whole life to saving him”, what kind of twisted male fantasy is this? You’re horny and lonely Chekov!

On page 22 (Pond, not Cart) George sums up the story (Cart) so far,

An unhappy woman is going somewhere in a cart.

“Meanwhile the road ringing was growing worse and worse” causing me to sum up my time in Vancouver thus,

A confused man is going nowhere in his quest to figure out WHERE THIS FUCKING DING DONG IS COMING FROM!

And all too soon, Chekov is wrapping up the story (it is short after all),

she felt as she had been then, young, good-looking, well-dressed, in a bright warm room among her own people. A feeling of joy and happiness suddenly came over her, she pressed her hands to her temples in an ecstacy, and called softly, beseechingly:
“Mother!” And she began crying, she did not know why. Just at that instant Hanov drove up with his team of four horses, and seeing him she imagined happiness such as she had never had, and smiled and nodded to him as an equal and a friend, and it seemed to her that her happiness, her triumph, was glowing in the sky and on all sides, in the windows and on the trees. Her father and mother had never died, she had never been a schoolmistress, it was a long, tedious, strange dream, and now she had awakened…
“Vassilyevna, get in!”
And at once it all vanished. The barrier was slowly raised. Marya Vassilyevna, shivering and numb with cold, got into the cart.
— Anton Chekov, In The Cart, 1897, Russkiye Vedomosti

From perfect dream to perfect nightmare. Reading this is like watching great cinema, I sit in wonder at the artist who can move and conduct me with such easy fluency; I feel buoyed up, rendered weightless by the exquisite craft. And I contrast this artist with the sadist, who curses me hourly, minutely, with this wretched ringing,

In reality, life was arranged awful and human relations were complicated so utterly beyond all understanding [BY THE INCESSANT RINGING OF THE BELL!] that when one thought about it one felt uncanny and one’s heart sank.
Anton Chekov, In The Cart, 1897, Russkiye Vedomosti

Anton Chekhov, The Schoolmistress, 1897, translated by Constance Garnett