The Happiness of the Storyteller

Abstract

The Happiness of the Storyteller David Weiss (bio) My verse version of Chekhov's "The Student" goes: First: fine weather, blackbirds, and off in the swamp, some- thing hooting as though it were "blowing into an empty bottle." A woodcock whirrs by, vocalizing, and a shot rings out in acclamation. Then a hard east wind comes up silencing the meadow, and with it come evening and splinters of ice; the student shoulders his gun, his cheeks burn with the cold. He calls to mind his father's cough, his mother, barefoot on the floor, polishing the samovar, that it's Good Friday, no dinner on the stove, and as he walks the three [End Page 407] miles to the village he thinks bitterly: this same wind blew in the time of Ivan the Terrible and of Peter, the same hunger and dire poverty, the same ignorance and misery, the same thatch roofs leaking; in a thousand years it will be no better, no different. Soon he reaches the widows' gardens; a hot, crackling fire broadcasts a glow over the ploughed beds; he stops to warm his hands and talk with Vasilisa and her daughter who's washing pots, the one mistreated by her husband. By just such a fire as this, says the student, shivering, did the Apostle Peter warm his hands, on a night just as dismal, and he begins to tell the story of Peter and his three denials; Peter who is ready to follow Jesus into prison, even into death: Peter who, waking, sees Jesus bound and beaten terribly; Peter who follows, behind, exhausted and confused, certain that something awful is about to happen on earth, yet three times denies knowing Christ before the cock crows, and goes "out of the courtyard [End Page 408] and weeps bitterly." In the stillness of the garden you can just make out Peter's smothered sobbing. Tears come down Vasilisa's smiling face and her daughter stares at the student as though holding back a terrible pain. Firelight flickers over a workman returning from the river on horseback, and the student takes his leave of the women. The road is cold, dark. Hard to believe that Easter is two days away; he looks back, the fire still burning, no one in sight. If Vasilisa was crying, he thinks, "it means that every- thing that happened with Peter on that dreadful night has some relation to her" and to her daughter and to this village and to him, too, and to all people; what happened in Peter's soul matters to her; as he crosses the river striding toward the last faint slash of sunset he knows that what took place nineteen centuries before is going on unbroken to this day—the truth and [End Page 409] the beauty of it come over him even as the wind cuts through him: he is only twenty-two, and life seems wondrous, vast, expectant. This is happiness; it changes not a thing, it isn't a thing, yet nothing will be the same. And it wasn't the way he told it, he tells himself, it was the story itself, the story itself. Here, at the end of the story, emerges an understanding that surpasses the student's earlier social critique and and even the theology of Good Friday: real power, transformative power, lies in, or is exercised by, the story itself; its power is independent of the teller. And it wasn't the way he told it, he tells himself, it was the story itself, the story itself. So, anyway, "he tells himself." What's the evidence that this is true? The effect the story has on Vasilisa and her daughter. Not the words, but the drama. "Truth and beauty," Chekhov has the student think, an old pairing. For the student, the revelation is that a story can intervene in this way. Although, what a story does is the opposite of an intervention. Not all stories have this efficacy. The first story we're told, which the student tells himself, is the centuries-long story of oppressive, unchanging life, and the effect on the student is embittering, although we might say that...