"Do you remember my friend, what you said to me when we became engaged? You're setting me free." There was another long silence and more caresses. "Do you remember when we talked for the first time about what it meant to love someone? It means to delight in what's good for the other person, to take pleasure in doing everything that makes the other person happy. Isn't that so? Again, silence and caresses. "What's best for you will also give me pleasure. But you must decide what's best for you. Why be so distressed about it? If you're all right, then I will be too."
I turned around and saw him sleeping next to me. He looked so peaceful almost dead. Was I dead? I had trouble sleeping that night and when it seemed like sleep would never come I slept and dreamt.
Vera Pavlovna had trouble sleeping that night. She dreamt a story or more like a nightmare that haunted her remaining moments. She was crying, wearing black from head to toe sitting near a door with the window to the side. Night had come and she had her hands covering her face. Tears poured down her cheek, she was alone but was she? She looked up and saw a face staring at her through a window. She didn't recognize the face nor feel any connection to the person but she was scared. She got up and yelled for that person to leave. Standing far away she pointed outside, too scared to come close to the individual and tell him leave.
The dream changed and now she was in a dessert with people surrounding her everywhere. The sun was shinning and it seemed like there was a main attraction at the center of what seemed to be a carnival. Water, perhaps. Was it water that everyone was attracted to? She desperately wanted to go and see what was in the middle. A huge pool or tank was displayed at the center and animals were performing tricks for the public while someone was orchestrating the event. People applauded and approved - smiling and happy in the presence of each other, almost unaware of the responsibility and dedication of the event. She stared down the middle as the crowd parted and there he was. The same face, the same person staring straight at her. With his bewitching stare that penetrated her core, her body. She couldn't move and was paralyzed at the sight of him. She didn't know then but she was meant to see this. He was holding a knife and as the crowd parted she felt a connection to him. She felt defenseless and the sound of the people was gone and all she saw was him.
She moved to another dream, perhaps because she didn't want to give in or perhaps her consciousness still wasn't allowing her to accept what she was guilty of. She was at home, in her room, sitting down by her table and reading. Undisturbed and rational she felt safe. Lopukhov came in rushing to her room, opening the door without knocking telling her that it was time. He looked excited so she though. His excitement was contagious and she rushed outside with him holding his hand. All their friends were there even distant ones. Lopukhov told her to get the drinks it was time to cut the cake. She heads to the kitchen and opens the door. It's dark and cold the drinks are in the middle. She picks them up and heads back but as she turns around he's next to her. She's frozen still looking at him closely now, she's too scared to even drop the glasses. She sees him still holding the knife and in the background everyone is dead. All made to look like rag dolls with their eyes cut out and sown shut sitting next to each other in a pose like state as if waiting to be pictured.
She escapes to another dream again. She's alone standing at a train station. There's no one there on the platform with her but then a family of three come in. They have a little girl who looks about six. She has dark long hair and she's wearing a white dress with a black bow around her waist. There's something strange about this encounter she thinks. The little girl is perfect, so happy and beautiful even smart as she is able to point out different objects and translate them into French, German, and Latin. Yet she is completely displaced from her parents, like a different entity. Her parents are dirty. Although they look tired and untidy they are proud of their daughter and consent to her every whim. Yet she isn't spoiled, there's nothing wrong with her except that black bow. The girl looks at Vera standing there and without a care in the world or concept of social behavior or better put restriction she hops to her and grabs her hand. Vera stands there and although to her it seems strange to hold this girl's hand she doesn't take it back. But as soon as she touches her hand the little girl transform into the raggedy doll that everyone else turned into. But she speaks. And what a thing she says. "Don't worry Vera, you'll die too." She looks up and sees that her parents also are dead and turned to dolls with no eyes their eyelids sown shut. Their sitting down and it's horrific yet there's a sense of peace. She doesn't let go of the little girl's hand and lets herself be led to the train tracks. The little girl walks in a mechanical way. Bobbing her head with sudden movements and jerking herself each step. Yet Vera still is holding her hand. She waits for the train ready to accept what she hasn't wanted to accept. Still holding to the little girl she looks up and sees far away a shadow of man staring through a window looking at her and she knows who it is but she's ok with it. The train comes and she's waiting for the blow but it doesn't come and misses her. She awakes and begins crying hysterically.
"What's wrong Vera? What's wrong? Tell me. Are you alright? Did you have another bad dream? You can tell me whatever it is. Please tell me," Lopukhov says.
She can't- she can't even speak but cry and she does and she loves it. Freedom. Freedom she is thinking to herself. The promise that they made the promise that kept them together all these years wasn't really a promise but an idea that lacked emotion that lacked life and worse love. She felt suffocated in his bed, at his side. She left and told him not to follow her.
"What have I done? Have I really lost myself in my everyday- in the mundane? Why does it feel like my life is a story being told by someone outside of me outside my human nature? Like a puppet and my puppeteer is playing with my strings making me dance and sing to entertain to make everything ok- I'm not just another page! Let me scream! I want to shout and yell but I'm scared. 'No', he would say. 'You can't scream you can't yell. It's three o'clock in the morning. It's unreasonable and people would think you are crazy. Talk to me let me help you.' No! If I could I would tear everything down and rip my clothes off my own skin. I would climb the walls with my nails and hang down if I could. I would scream and bleed if I could! So what if everything right now is wrong? Tell me if you want to help me, tell me how to be more real."
Vera looks in the mirror. Her eyes are red. She stares at herself and begins crying taking pity in what she sees as if it was someone else. She begins combing her hair and hums to a tune she isn't sure if she's heard before or if she's making it up.
"Am I going crazy? Have I lost everything I've worked so hard for? I never meant to hurt you. I never meant to entrap you in my life. But you were kind oh my dear friend with your kind words and heart. – I mustn't think like this. He did what was best for him. Or what he thought was best for him. Let me speak! So what if I loose everything so what if nothing is perfect and I throw away everything."
She begins crying again, putting down the brush steadily with her hand and taking one last look at herself in the mirror she puts her head down and cries. She doesn't know what she is going to do but she feels something – something that she has never felt before. Not appreciation and perhaps it was guilt and perhaps it was selfishness but she doesn't care. At times she has felt the weight of everyone on her shoulders. Not only was her actions and her image a reflection of herself but a model of something bigger, an example and she then remember the words that he had said while caressing her and rationalizing her dream, it was going to be alright. But she didn't want it to be alright. She wanted to fall into perturbation.
She took a mirror and a piece of cloth pressed it hard against her table and broke in half. A sharp edge looked at her reflecting her smile. She got down on her knees no more tears in her eyes she was in a zone. Her heartbeat was clam and steady, hey eyes focused. Everything in her room was plain and nothing was unnecessary only essential. But there was no time to complain she was late as it is. The window was open slightly and darkness poured in darker than nights before with a smell that she couldn't make out. As the darkness poured in she remembered everything and felt it all at once. In this state of perturbation she embraced it. Still holding the mirror with her hand she cut deep into her wrists and her tears became her blood. With her bloody hand she cut the other wrist, this time the pain didn't make a connection with what she felt. It was unreasonable, unnecessary but needed. With each cut she felt freer. It was the only thing that was real among all the false pretensions and perfection – uncommon, inhuman, perfections. For once in a long time she felt human again.
"What have I become my dearest friend? Everyone I know is dead. You could have it all, my empire of dirt. I will let you down I will make you hurt. How pretty it is. It flows and numbs. Hate me, love me, rape me don't perfect. I am my own prototype of righteousness and wickedness. But it's ok my sweetest friend we all do things to make each day easier. I never loved you I appreciated your presence. You'll never know this of course. None of this," thought Vera Pavlovna as the blood dripped down to the floor and she laid there in silence because thought has lost all meaning.
The blood dripped down and she leaned against the side of her bed because suddenly her hands weighed her down, her whole body weighed her down. She thought about the mirror and where she had put it and at what moment had she discard it. Those were her dying thoughts. The blood soaked her white dress staining it around her waist in coloring it black in the dead of night and she closed her eyes for the moment when it will hit her and she will never wake up.
Vera Pavlovna died on a Saturday morning on January 24 two days before her birthday. Unlike of her to take her life you say. What's so unlike of her? Did you ever really know her? Ah, you say you do you perspicacious reader. Ha, I say and I don't mean to laugh in your face, but yes, -yes I actually do mean to laugh at you. Was it really her you didn't want to die or the idea that she conveyed? I'll answer the question for you. It was the idea that she conveyed. I'm sure you have followed the story detail by detail as I have so eloquently set for you but dig deeper than you have dug and you'll see the wrong in everything. The falseness connoted as rational and contentment categorized as reasonable and advantageous. But to who oh perspicacious reader was all this for? Only for you. To conveyed to you a moral sense of security and unification of unrealistic idealism. It was you who killed her. It was your dislike to be human but superhuman that drove her to the brink of exhaustion. You could have had her still if she didn't regain her humanness if she didn't succumb to what she was trying hard to live without, if she didn't let herself fall but I'm sure you pernicious - oh did I say that I meant perspicacious reader would have found a way to kill that too or worse forget all she did.
Now, I'm not the type to point fingers and dictate a way of life that is best for all. In fact I'm wrong if I ever led you to believe that. Did you ever feel that there was something missing amongst all the characters? A sense of wrongdoing, a guilty pleasure besides buying cigars or drinking, evilness if you will. How beautiful it would be to live a life always on a straight line. Not to ever have a bad thought or malicious wish. I must make it clear in the next lines that I'm also not a person to disregard all and put aside everything valuable and recluse in a world of cynicism and become sadistic –associating my pain with pleasure. I'd be more wrong doing so. But I'll let you come to your own conclusion.
I know little about human nature but my own and history can teach us only to an extent. I don't presume to know anything outside any of you. I haven't kept any secrets from you and everything is plainly viewed to a sharp eye. But if the ending upsets you it was meant to. Let the fear, anger, pain, love be real and don't substitute it for a better way of life. Yet I feel like a hypocrite because it's in our human nature to better ourselves but at what cost? There is no clear answer here and that in itself is the best answer. Free will is a great thing.