ENGLISH HL WORLD LITERATURE ASSIGNMENT 2 b

St. Marys School, Nairobi Candidate Name: Adrian Kibet Candidate Number: 000236-011 Session: November 2012 Word Count: 1546

STATEMENT OF INTENT
This piece of work is based on the short story Grief by Anton Chekov. It is intended as a continuation of the story from the point at which the author ended the story. The aim of my writing is to give a back-story to the work and also to present Grigory Petrov, who is the main character of the story in a sympathetic light. This is because while reading the story I got the impression that he truly loved his wife Matryona and regretted her death. If that were the case, why then would he treat her in such a fashion as he did in the book? My continuation aims to answer that question or at the very least justify his behavior. I chose this as my topic because whenever I read the story it always struck me as unusual that Petrov treated his wife so dismally despite and then seemed like he truly regretted her death and he also went through a lot of trouble to get her to the hospital. One part of the story that truly affected my choice was the ending as he was mourning his loss, it always seemed to me as though he was mourning Matryona more than the loss of his limbs. This inspired me to come up with a story that explained his contradictory behavior.

THE REMNANTS OF GRIEF

Grigory Petrov sat quietly in his corner of the street where he once lived. His rags shifted as a rat ran over the stump where his leg ended. They did not bother him at all, in the two years since his wifes death and the loss of his limbs he had sunk as low as to eat a dead rat or two when he was

lucky enough to find them. He mostly got by on what he was given by merciful passers by or what he could scavenge which was not much, considering his lack of limbs. Often he would think of the path that led him to where he now was. Fate, he knew, had no obligation to be fair and in his case, no inclination either. He could still remember clearly forty two years ago on the night of his wedding. He had been the happiest man alive, he was married to the love of his life and his reputation as an excellent craftsman was growing rapidly. The entire town was at the celebration of his marriage to Matryona who was considered quite a beauty by all. He still could not believe he had her hand in marriage. There had been many rumors that her father, a renowned business man, had no intentions of having her marry. His blessing of their marriage had come as a pleasant surprise. He still did not know why he had been accepted. He had always attributed it to his skill as a turner but now that he had thought about it for two years while sober, he thought it more likely that her father thought he was a fool who could be easily manipulated. Despite the incontrovertible proof of his own eyes he still could not believe what he had seen that night and Matryonas damning words kept ringing in his ears. He had been able to drown out the memories slightly with drink but even that fragile peace was lost to him now. All he had now was his memories, and what blasted things they were. They haunted him in his every waking hour and plagued his dreams incessantly. He remembered the man he had been before that cursed night and longed to be that nave again. He longed not to know of the depravity of society and the misery that love could bring. That was the saddest and most pathetic part of all, that after all he knew he still loved his dead wife.

The night of the wedding, everything had been going according to plan and he had been happy beyond his wildest dreams. He had been deep in conversation with another turner who was a close friend when he noticed his bride was nowhere to be seen. He turned to ask his father - in law if he knew where she had gone but found that he too was nowhere to be seen. He politely excused himself and went in search of her. Neither her nor her father had been seen by anyone so he decided to check the mansions private quarters. It was in one of the usually unoccupied guest rooms that he met the sight that changed his life forever. Standing in the open doorway, unnoticed by the rooms occupants he watched with horror as his newly acquired bride and her father held each other in the throes of passion. His stomach churned and he became closer acquainted with the food and drink he had taken that night. His vomiting alerted the lovers to his presence and they scrambled in an absurd effort to preserve dignity considering what he had already witnessed. He sank to the ground and watched numbly as his father in law dressed and left. Alone with his wife, he struggled to find the words to question her but came up empty. He found he could not even look her in the eye. She dressed quietly and came to kneel by him on the floor. She reached out to him but he could not bear her touch so he scrambled away from her. He mustered the courage to look in her eyes and what he found there rocked him to his core. She did not look upon him with shame or guilt but with pity. She gazed upon him as one would gaze upon a sickly dog. He slowly came to the realization that he did not know the woman before him at all. She then proceeded to further destroy his image of her by telling him of her intimate relationship with her father. She told him that they had been lovers since she had been twelve years old. She then confessed that she has recently discovered she was with child and it could

only be by her father. The latter, that she was pregnant by him, he now realized was probably why her father had finally relented and let her marry. He could not believe the things he had heard his wife tell him and forty years later he could still scarcely believe it. At first, he believed that he could undo the damage Matryonas father had caused her but he slowly realized that she truly believed that she loved her father as a soul mate. Left with no alternative, for he still loved her despite the futility of the situation, he took her and left the town. On the way to the Galchino district he took her to a doctor of somewhat ill repute to have the baby aborted. She fought against it but he paid the doctor to drug her and undertake the procedure. When she recovered from the effects of the drug and realized that she was no longer with child, she slid into a state of near madness. The doctor called it severe depression. While she was capable of talking and obeying commands, she was merely a shell of her old self. For a while he tried to take care of her in hopes that he could salvage some of what he thought they had shared but eventually he realized that she had never loved him. It was this fact on top of all that had happened that finally drove him to drinking. He started beating her to try and get a reaction out of her but all he got was a frustrating humility, only on the night of her death did she look at him with different eyes. She looked at him with the same gaze she had used when she told him of her love affair and it was those eyes more than anything that drove him to take her to the doctor. The years between the wedding and her death had been a blur and he had crawled so deep into the bottle that he had even forgotten why he beat his wife and why he drank in the first place. Now that he was a model of sobriety he could think of nothing else. He looked up from his place on the corner of the street to see his wife looking at him. He knew she was not really there and

was most likely a hallucination conjured up by a brain that was finally breaking from the abuse it had suffered. Still he liked to believe it was the ghost of his dead wife that appeared to him every day before sunset. He liked to tell himself that free from the restraints of her mortal body and the abuse it had suffered she could finally feel his love and give back in kind. Gazing into her ethereal, love-filled face, he thought to himself that if nothing else, at least he had this. The sun dipped below the horizon taking away the light and with it the vision of his beloved. He shifted in his rags getting into a more comfortable position to await the next sunset.

Bibliography
A, C. (1883-1888). Chekov Short Stories. Mordern Library.