Oddly enough, even in America there are people who believe that turtles bring happiness. However, we can say with complete confidence that the turtles themselves do not even suspect this.
Mr. Mishkow has a friend who is absolutely convinced of this. He plays on the stock exchange and every morning, before going there, he places his turtle in front of a small ladder. If the turtle tries to climb the ladder, he is imbued with confidence that securities, which he intends to play with, will rise in value. If the turtle tucks its head and paws under the shield, the papers will have the same firm course; if she turns away and leaves, he decisively plays short. And this thing is unmistakable.
Having once spoken in this spirit, he went into a store where they sold turtles, bought one and put it in Mr. Mishkow’s hand:
- Try it, you'll see for yourself.
Mr. Mishkow is an impressionable person. Carrying home a turtle (ugh!), this lively round little man is completely overcome with trembling - perhaps with pleasure, but perhaps also with slight disgust. He is extremely indifferent to the fact that passers-by turn around in surprise, noticing a turtle in his hands. He trembles at the thought that this thing, like a motionless, cold stone, is in fact not a stone at all, but, on the contrary, under this shield lives a mysterious animal, which at any moment can release here, in his palm, four crooked rough legs and a head old wrinkled nun. Let's hope the turtle doesn't do this. Mr. Mishkow would have thrown her to the ground, shaking from head to toe.
It cannot be said that at home his daughter Helen and son John were especially delighted with the turtle when he laid it, like a picked cobblestone, on the carpet in the living room.
It's incredible how old the eyes of both of Mr. Mishkow's children seem compared to their father's amazing eyes.
The children cast a heavy, heavy glance from their leaden eyes at the turtle, lying like a cobblestone on the carpet. Then they look at their father with the absolutely firm conviction that he will not be able to give them a reasonable explanation for the unheard-of thing he did by placing a turtle on the living room carpet, and poor Mr. Mishkow somehow grows dim, throws up his hands, and has a wandering expression on his lips. a confused smile, and he squeezes out that, after all, this is just a completely harmless turtle that you could even play with.
As if to prove that he has always been a nice guy, a little childish by nature, he gets down on all fours on the carpet and carefully, delicately begins to push the turtle from behind, thus encouraging it to release its legs and head from under its shield and crawl. But, my God, it was truly worth doing to see how much fun this beautiful house, all glass and mirrored, where he brought her. Unexpectedly, his son John finds a much less delicate, but more effective way to bring the turtle out of the fossilized state in which it stubbornly remains. With the tip of his boot, he tips it over onto the shield, and then the animal begins to move its legs and stretch its neck with difficulty, trying to return to its natural position.
At the sight of this, Helen, without changing the expression of her senile eyes, bursts into loud laughter, similar to the creaking of a rusty well block when some crazy bucket suddenly falls sharply.
It is easy to understand that children are not impressed by the fact that turtles bring happiness. On the contrary, all their behavior clearly indicates that they will tolerate a turtle in the house only because they can treat it like the most pitiful toy that is tossed with the tip of a shoe. And Mr. Mishkow really, really doesn’t like this. He looks at the turtle, which he immediately turned upside down and which returned to its fossil form; looks into the eyes of his children and suddenly discovers a mysterious similarity between the senile expression of these eyes and the eternal stony inertia of the animal on the carpet. He is gripped by some kind of horror at his childish spontaneity in that world, which, revealing such unexpected and strange similarities of things and phenomena, seems to indicate its own decrepitude; horror that he, without knowing it, might have been expecting something that could no longer happen, since children on earth are now born a hundred years old, like turtles.
He tries again to put on a confused smile on his face, more faded than ever, and he doesn’t have the courage to admit why his friend gave him the turtle.
Mr. Mishkow is remarkably ignorant of life. Life for him is not something completely clear, and generally known things do not matter to him. It may well happen to him that one fine morning, climbing naked into the bathtub and already raising one leg over its edge, he will suddenly look at his own body with surprise, as if in forty-two years of his life he had never seen it even now it is revealed to him for the first time. The human body, God forgive me, is not something that can be shown naked even to oneself without shame. It is preferable to ignore it. But still for Mr. Mishkow there remains full of meaning the fact that such a thought had never occurred to him: with this body of his and all its parts, usually invisible to anyone, for they are always hidden under clothes, he has been wandering through life for forty-two years. It seems incredible to him that he could live his entire life only in this body of his. No no. It’s unknown where, unknown how, and perhaps even completely unaccountably. Maybe he always flew imperceptibly from one thing to another - and you never know how many of them came across his way since childhood, when he most certainly had a completely different body, and who knows which one. And it’s true, it’s quite painful and even a little scary that there’s no way to explain to yourself why your body must inevitably be what it is, not something else, something completely different. It's better not to think about it. And now, in the bathroom, he smiles again with his confused smile, not even realizing that he has been sitting in the bath for a long time. Oh, how radiant are these starched muslin curtains of the large window and how easily, how gracefully they move on their brass cornices from the gentle spring breeze, as if flying from tall trees parka! Now he is already wiping this really very unsightly body of his with a towel, but still must agree that life is beautiful and it can be fully enjoyed even in this bodily shell, for which in some strange way the most intimate intimacy with such an impenetrable a woman like Mrs. Mishkow.
Married for nine years, he still cannot unravel the mystery of how this unthinkable marriage of his with Mrs. Mishkow turned out to be possible.
He never dared to move in any direction without feeling unsure after each step taken - whether he could take the next one. And in the end, it was as if goosebumps were crawling all over his body, and a frightened amazement arose in his soul when it turned out that, despite such slow and cautious steps, he had already made great progress. It was necessary to think one way or another about what this would mean for him?
And then one fine day, even somehow not believing it himself, he turned out to be the husband of Mrs. Mishkow.
Even now, after nine years of marriage, she is a beautiful porcelain figurine, so detached and isolated from everyone, so withdrawn and as if glazed over in her impenetrable manner of existing, that it seems simply incredible how she could marry such a person of flesh and blood, How is he. But it is quite clear how their union could produce such dried-up children. Maybe if Mr. Mishkow himself could carry them in the womb instead of his wife, they would have been born differently. But she had to bear them, for nine months each; and so, conceived, apparently, as they showed themselves from the very beginning, and, moreover, forced to spend so much time in a majolica womb, like sweets in a box, they grew old even before they were born.
Current page: 1 (book has 1 pages in total)
Luigi Pirandello
Turtle
Oddly enough, even in America there are people who believe that turtles bring happiness. However, we can say with complete confidence that the turtles themselves do not even suspect this.
Mr. Mishkow has a friend who is absolutely convinced of this. He plays on the stock exchange and every morning, before going there, he places his turtle in front of a small ladder. If the turtle tries to climb the ladder, he becomes confident that the securities he intends to play with will rise in price. If the turtle tucks its head and paws under the shield, the papers will have the same firm course; if she turns away and leaves, he decisively plays short. And this thing is unmistakable.
Having once spoken in this spirit, he went into a store where they sold turtles, bought one and put it in Mr. Mishkow’s hand:
- Try it, you'll see for yourself.
Mr. Mishkow is an impressionable person. Carrying home a turtle (ugh!), this lively round little man is completely overcome with trembling - perhaps with pleasure, but perhaps also with slight disgust. He is extremely indifferent to the fact that passers-by turn around in surprise, noticing a turtle in his hands. He trembles at the thought that this thing, like a motionless, cold stone, is in fact not a stone at all, but, on the contrary, under this shield lives a mysterious animal, which at any moment can release here, in his palm, four crooked rough legs and a head old wrinkled nun. Let's hope the turtle doesn't do this. Mr. Mishkow would have thrown her to the ground, shaking from head to toe.
It cannot be said that at home his daughter Helen and son John were especially delighted with the turtle when he laid it, like a picked cobblestone, on the carpet in the living room.
It's incredible how old the eyes of both of Mr. Mishkow's children seem compared to their father's amazing eyes.
The children cast a heavy, heavy glance from their leaden eyes at the turtle, lying like a cobblestone on the carpet. Then they look at their father with the absolutely firm conviction that he will not be able to give them a reasonable explanation for the unheard-of thing he did by placing a turtle on the living room carpet, and poor Mr. Mishkow somehow grows dim, throws up his hands, and has a wandering expression on his lips. a confused smile, and he squeezes out that, after all, this is just a completely harmless turtle that you could even play with.
As if to prove that he has always been a nice guy, a little childish by nature, he gets down on all fours on the carpet and carefully, delicately begins to push the turtle from behind, thus encouraging it to release its legs and head from under its shield and crawl. But, my God, it was truly worth doing to see how cheerful this beautiful house was, all glass and mirrors, where he brought her. Unexpectedly, his son John finds a much less delicate, but more effective way to bring the turtle out of the state of fossilization in which it stubbornly remains. With the tip of his boot, he tips it over onto the shield, and then the animal begins to move its legs and stretch its neck with difficulty, trying to return to its natural position.
At the sight of this, Helen, without changing the expression of her senile eyes, bursts into loud laughter, similar to the creaking of a rusty well block when some crazy bucket suddenly falls sharply.
It is easy to understand that children are not impressed by the fact that turtles bring happiness. On the contrary, all their behavior clearly indicates that they will tolerate a turtle in the house only because they can treat it like the most pitiful toy that is tossed with the tip of a shoe. And Mr. Mishkow really, really doesn’t like this. He looks at the turtle, which he immediately turned upside down and which returned to its fossil form; looks into the eyes of his children and suddenly discovers a mysterious similarity between the senile expression of these eyes and the eternal stony inertia of the animal on the carpet. He is gripped by some kind of horror at his childish spontaneity in that world, which, revealing such unexpected and strange similarities of things and phenomena, seems to indicate its own decrepitude; horror that he, without knowing it, might have been expecting something that could no longer happen, since children on earth are now born a hundred years old, like turtles.
He tries again to put on a confused smile on his face, more faded than ever, and he doesn’t have the courage to admit why his friend gave him the turtle.
Mr. Mishkow is remarkably ignorant of life. Life for him is not something completely clear, and generally known things do not matter to him. It may well happen to him that one fine morning, climbing naked into the bathtub and already raising one leg over its edge, he will suddenly look at his own body with surprise, as if in forty-two years of his life he had never seen it even now it is revealed to him for the first time. The human body, God forgive me, is not something that can be shown naked even to oneself without shame. It is preferable to ignore it. But still, for Mr. Mishkow, the fact remains full of significance that such a thought had never occurred to him: with this body of his and all its parts, usually invisible to anyone, for they are always hidden under clothes, he has been wandering through life for already forty-two years old. It seems incredible to him that he could live his entire life only in this body of his. No no. It’s unknown where, unknown how, and perhaps even completely unaccountably. Maybe he always flew imperceptibly from one thing to another - and you never know how many of them came across his way since childhood, when he most certainly had a completely different body, and who knows which one. And it’s true, it’s quite painful and even a little scary that there is no way to explain to yourself why your body must inevitably be the way it is, not something else, completely different. It's better not to think about it. And now, in the bathroom, he smiles again with his confused smile, not even realizing that he has been sitting in the bath for a long time. Oh, how radiant are these starched muslin curtains of the large window and how easily, how gracefully they move on their brass cornices from the gentle spring breeze, as if flying from the tall trees of the park! Now he is already wiping this really very unsightly body of his with a towel, but still must agree that life is beautiful and it can be fully enjoyed even in this bodily shell, for which in some strange way the most intimate intimacy with such an impenetrable a woman like Mrs. Mishkow.
Married for nine years, he still cannot unravel the mystery of how this unthinkable marriage of his with Mrs. Mishkow turned out to be possible.
He never dared to move in any direction without feeling unsure after each step taken - whether he could take the next one. And in the end, it was as if goosebumps were crawling all over his body, and a frightened amazement arose in his soul when it turned out that, despite such slow and cautious steps, he had already made great progress. It was necessary to think one way or another about what this would mean for him?
And then one fine day, even somehow not believing it himself, he turned out to be the husband of Mrs. Mishkow.
Even now, after nine years of marriage, she is a beautiful porcelain figurine, so detached and isolated from everyone, so withdrawn and as if glazed over in her impenetrable manner of existing, that it seems simply incredible how she could marry such a person of flesh and blood, How is he. But it is quite clear how their union could produce such dried-up children. Maybe if Mr. Mishkow himself could carry them in the womb instead of his wife, they would have been born differently. But she had to bear them, for nine months each; and so, conceived, apparently, as they showed themselves from the very beginning, and, moreover, forced to spend so much time in a majolica womb, like sweets in a box, they grew old even before they were born.
During all nine years of marriage, he naturally lived in constant fear that Mrs. Mishkow might find a reason for divorce in some thoughtless word or awkward gesture of his. The first day of marriage was the most terrible for him, because, as one can imagine, there was no complete confidence that Mrs. Mishkow knew what exactly he had to do in order to finally consider himself her husband. Fortunately, she knew this. But then she never let him know that she remembered that at that time he could be quite sure of it. It was as if she, for her part, had contributed nothing to it, and thus, although he had taken possession of her, she had no need to remember it. However, first a girl, Helen, was born, and then a second child, a boy, John. But there were no conversations. Without saying a word to him, she went to the clinic both times and returned home a month and a half later: the first time with a girl, the second with a boy, and both children looked old, one older than the other. I just gave up. And both times he was absolutely forbidden to visit her at the clinic. So neither the first nor the second time he could even give himself an account of her pregnancy, he knew nothing about how the birth proceeded, how it was resolved, and yet there were two children in the house, like two dogs acquired on a trip , and he could not even have any firm confidence that she gave birth to them and that these were his children.
Nevertheless, Mr. Mishkow does not doubt this at all and is even sure that in the person of these two children he is presented with the eternal and in this case twice confirmed evidence that Miss Mishkow finds in cohabitation with him some compensation for the suffering that she must have experienced in giving birth to two children.
And so he could not recover from his amazement when his wife, returning from her mother, who lived in a hotel and was already preparing to return to England, and finding him standing on all fours on the carpet in front of the turtle under the coldly mocking glances of the children, did not say Not a word to him, but, immediately returning to her mother at the hotel, an hour later she sent him a note with the most ultimatum demand: either there will be no turtle in the house, or in three days she and her mother will leave for England.
As soon as Mr. Mishkow regained the ability to think rationally, he immediately realized that the turtle could only be a pretext in this case. And how frivolous, how easily vulnerable! But perhaps this is why it is much more difficult to eliminate than if his wife demanded that he completely change his appearance or at least remove his nose from his face and replace it with another that would be more to her taste.
However, he didn't want to lose her. He told his wife to return home calmly, and he would find another, more suitable place for the turtle. He took it because he was told it brought happiness. But, taking into account that he himself is no longer in his early youth and he has a wife like her and two children like their children, what other happiness does he need?
And so he leaves the house, again with the turtle in his hand and with the intention of leaving it in some place that would be more suitable for the unfortunate, restless animal than their home. Meanwhile, evening had come, and he was only now convinced of this with surprise. Although he was accustomed to the spectacle of his huge phantasmagoric city, he nevertheless retained the ability to always be amazed at it in a new way, and even with some sadness, for all these grandiose structures are so durable architectural monuments, and they rise from all sides, like a colossal but temporary decoration of some huge fair with this motionless, motley-colored, bright light of countless lamps and lanterns, causing something like melancholy when you walk for a long time under it, and with many other things, so or vain and fragile.
Walking down the street, he even forgot that he was holding a turtle in his hand, but suddenly he remembered it, and it occurred to him that it would be better if he left it in the park near his house, instead of walking further towards the store where it was purchased, I think, on 49th Street.
So he goes on his way, being quite sure that at this hour the store is probably already closed. But the sadness and fatigue that overcame him seemed to demand that he come across a locked door.
So he comes up to this door and looks at it: the store is really closed, then at the turtle in his hand. What to do with it? A taxi passes by and he gets into the car. Somewhere in suitable place he will come out and leave the turtle inside.
It's a shame that this little creature, still huddled under its shield, seems to have so little imagination. It's interesting to imagine a turtle driving around New York at night.
No no. Mr. Mishkow is overcome with remorse: that would be cruel. He gets out of the taxi. It's not far to Park Avenue with an endless line of flower beds in the middle, bordered by a low wicker border. He's about to leave a turtle in one of these flower beds; he barely has time to lay it down when the figure of a policeman appears nearby, monitoring traffic on the corner of 50th Street under one of the giant towers of the Waldorf Astoria. The policeman wants to know what he put in the flowerbed. Bomb? No, not a bomb. And Mr. Mishkow smiles at him so that he understands that he is not capable of this. Just a turtle. But the policeman orders him to remove it immediately: animals are prohibited from entering the flowerbeds. But what kind of animal is this? It’s like a rock, Mr. Mishkow tries to explain, it won’t interfere here, and besides, for some family reasons, he needs to get rid of it. But now the policeman thinks that Mr. Mishkow is mocking him, and he speaks in a rude tone, and Mr. Mishkow immediately removes the turtle, which is still motionless, from the flowerbed.
“They say they bring happiness,” he says with a smile, “would you like to take it?” As a gift?
He shrugs his shoulders furiously and tells him to get out. And now the turtle is again in Mr. Mishkow’s hand, and he is extremely confused. My God, but he could leave her right there, in the middle of the street, as soon as he left the field of view of this policeman, who was so rude obviously because he did not believe in important reasons of a family nature. And then a thought suddenly dawns on Mr. Mishkow. Of course, for his wife, the turtle is only an excuse, and if you remove this excuse, she will immediately find another, but it will be difficult for her to find a more absurd one, more capable of harming her in the eyes of the judge and everyone else. It would be stupid of him not to take advantage of this. And in the end he decides to return home with the turtle.
He finds his wife in the living room. Without saying a word, she bends down and places the turtle like a stone on the carpet in front of her. The wife jumps up, rushes to her room and returns from there wearing a hat.
“I’ll tell the judge that you prefer the company of a turtle to the company of your wife.”
And disappears.
As if hearing her from the carpet, the little animal suddenly released its four legs, tail, and head from under the shield and, swaying slightly, almost dancing, crawled around the living room.
Mr. Mishkow has no choice but to rejoice at this, while still timidly. He claps his hands lightly and, looking at the turtle, thinks that he must admit, although without firm conviction:
- And this is happiness, happiness!
Turtle
In a nutshell: A friend gives the hero a turtle, believing that it brings happiness. The hero's children treat her cruelly, his wife finds in her a reason for divorce, and the hero himself understands that he wants to be himself.
Mr. Mishkow's friend believes that turtles bring happiness. He plays on the New York stock exchange and every morning he places his turtle in front of the ladder. If an animal tries to climb the ladder, the shares will rise in price, if the turtle turns away, the share price will fall, but if it pulls its head and paws under its shell, the price will not change. That is why a friend gives Mr. Mishkow a small turtle.
Mr. Mishkow, a “live little round man,” carries the turtle home, trembling with slight disgust and the knowledge that the stone-like object in his hand is a living creature. At home, he shows the turtle to his daughter Helen and son John, but they are not happy. Their eyes, in comparison with the living eyes of their father, seem senile; they look at the animal with a heavy, leaden gaze and do not understand why their father brought him to their beautiful, clean house.
Mr. Mishkow tries to explain to the children that you can play with the turtle, and even tries to show how to do this - he gets on all fours and pushes the turtle from behind, encouraging it to release its legs from under its shell. Suddenly, John turns the animal onto its back with the toe of his boot, and Helen begins to laugh as she watches it try to roll over. Mr. Mixshaw understands that children will only be able to treat the turtle as “the most pathetic toy,” and he does not like it.
Mr. Mixshaw doesn't know life at all. Having undressed in the bathroom, he is quite capable of marveling at his own 42-year-old body and wondering how “the most intimate intimacy with such an impenetrable woman as Mrs. Mishkow turned out to be possible for him.”
It is quite painful and even a little scary that there is no way to explain to yourself why your body must inevitably be the way it is, not something else, completely different.
Married for nine years, Mr. Mishkow still does not understand how he ended up as the husband of Mrs. Mishkow, as beautiful as a glazed porcelain figurine. She is so detached and isolated from everyone that it is unclear how such a woman became the wife of a man of flesh and blood. But it is clear why “such dried-up babies” came out of this porcelain womb - they grew old even before they were born.
Perhaps they would have been born differently if Mr. Mixshaw himself had carried them, but he didn’t even know anything about his wife’s pregnancies. She simply went to the clinic for a month and a half and returned with an old child. Mr. Mishkow was not even completely sure that his wife gave birth to the children.
Throughout the nine years of marriage, Mr. Mishkow was afraid that his wife would find a reason for divorce. Returning home and finding her husband on all fours in front of the turtle, Mrs. Mishkow gives him a choice: either he gets rid of the vile animal, or she goes to her mother in England. Not wanting to lose his wife, Mr. Mishkow takes the turtle and goes to the store where it was purchased.
Finding that evening has come in the huge, phantasmagoric city that looks like a colossal but temporary scenery and the store is already closed, Mr. Mishkow gets into a taxi, intending to leave the turtle in the car.
It's a shame that this little creature, still cowering under its shield, seems to have so little imagination. It's interesting to imagine a turtle driving around New York at night.
Mr. Mishkow then decides that doing such a thing to a living creature is cruel, gets out of the taxi and tries to leave the turtle in the flower bed. A policeman stops him and tells him to remove the turtle - this is not allowed. The policeman does not give in to persuasion, does not want to take the animal for himself, and Mr. Mishkow is again left with the turtle in his hands.
Suddenly he realizes that for his wife the turtle is just an excuse; having eliminated him, she will find another. But it will be difficult for her to find an excuse that looks even more ridiculous in the eyes of the judge and society, and Mr. Mishkow would be foolish not to take advantage of it.
He returns home and places the turtle on the carpet in front of his wife. Mrs. Mishkow immediately leaves, and the animal suddenly comes to life and begins to crawl cheerfully around the living room. Looking at the turtle, Mr. Mishkow uncertainly thinks: “And this is happiness, happiness!”
Luigi Pirandello
Turtle
Oddly enough, even in America there are people who believe that turtles bring happiness. However, we can say with complete confidence that the turtles themselves do not even suspect this.
Mr. Mishkow has a friend who is absolutely convinced of this. He plays on the stock exchange and every morning, before going there, he places his turtle in front of a small ladder. If the turtle tries to climb the ladder, he becomes confident that the securities he intends to play with will rise in price. If the turtle tucks its head and paws under the shield, the papers will have the same firm course; if she turns away and leaves, he decisively plays short. And this thing is unmistakable.
Having once spoken in this spirit, he went into a store where they sold turtles, bought one and put it in Mr. Mishkow’s hand:
- Try it, you'll see for yourself.
Mr. Mishkow is an impressionable person. Carrying home a turtle (ugh!), this lively round little man is completely overcome with trembling - perhaps with pleasure, but perhaps also with slight disgust. He is extremely indifferent to the fact that passers-by turn around in surprise, noticing a turtle in his hands. He trembles at the thought that this thing, like a motionless, cold stone, is in fact not a stone at all, but, on the contrary, under this shield lives a mysterious animal, which at any moment can release here, in his palm, four crooked rough legs and a head old wrinkled nun. Let's hope the turtle doesn't do this. Mr. Mishkow would have thrown her to the ground, shaking from head to toe.
It cannot be said that at home his daughter Helen and son John were especially delighted with the turtle when he laid it, like a picked cobblestone, on the carpet in the living room.
It's incredible how old the eyes of both of Mr. Mishkow's children seem compared to their father's amazing eyes.
The children cast a heavy, heavy glance from their leaden eyes at the turtle, lying like a cobblestone on the carpet. Then they look at their father with the absolutely firm conviction that he will not be able to give them a reasonable explanation for the unheard-of thing he did by placing a turtle on the living room carpet, and poor Mr. Mishkow somehow grows dim, throws up his hands, and has a wandering expression on his lips. a confused smile, and he squeezes out that, after all, this is just a completely harmless turtle that you could even play with.
As if to prove that he has always been a nice guy, a little childish by nature, he gets down on all fours on the carpet and carefully, delicately begins to push the turtle from behind, thus encouraging it to release its legs and head from under its shield and crawl. But, my God, it was truly worth doing to see how cheerful this beautiful house was, all glass and mirrors, where he brought her. Unexpectedly, his son John finds a much less delicate, but more effective way to bring the turtle out of the state of fossilization in which it stubbornly remains. With the tip of his boot, he tips it over onto the shield, and then the animal begins to move its legs and stretch its neck with difficulty, trying to return to its natural position.
At the sight of this, Helen, without changing the expression of her senile eyes, bursts into loud laughter, similar to the creaking of a rusty well block when some crazy bucket suddenly falls sharply.
It is easy to understand that children are not impressed by the fact that turtles bring happiness. On the contrary, all their behavior clearly indicates that they will tolerate a turtle in the house only because they can treat it like the most pitiful toy that is tossed with the tip of a shoe. And Mr. Mishkow really, really doesn’t like this. He looks at the turtle, which he immediately turned upside down and which returned to its fossil form; looks into the eyes of his children and suddenly discovers a mysterious similarity between the senile expression of these eyes and the eternal stony inertia of the animal on the carpet. He is gripped by some kind of horror at his childish spontaneity in that world, which, revealing such unexpected and strange similarities of things and phenomena, seems to indicate its own decrepitude; horror that he, without knowing it, might have been expecting something that could no longer happen, since children on earth are now born a hundred years old, like turtles.
He tries again to put on a confused smile on his face, more faded than ever, and he doesn’t have the courage to admit why his friend gave him the turtle.
Mr. Mishkow is remarkably ignorant of life. Life for him is not something completely clear, and generally known things do not matter to him. It may well happen to him that one fine morning, climbing naked into the bathtub and already raising one leg over its edge, he will suddenly look at his own body with surprise, as if in forty-two years of his life he had never seen it even now it is revealed to him for the first time. The human body, God forgive me, is not something that can be shown naked even to oneself without shame. It is preferable to ignore it. But still, for Mr. Mishkow, the fact remains full of significance that such a thought had never occurred to him: with this body of his and all its parts, usually invisible to anyone, for they are always hidden under clothes, he has been wandering through life for already forty-two years old. It seems incredible to him that he could live his entire life only in this body of his. No no. It’s unknown where, unknown how, and perhaps even completely unaccountably. Maybe he always flew imperceptibly from one thing to another - and you never know how many of them came across his way since childhood, when he most certainly had a completely different body, and who knows which one. And it’s true, it’s quite painful and even a little scary that there is no way to explain to yourself why your body must inevitably be the way it is, not something else, completely different. It's better not to think about it. And now, in the bathroom, he smiles again with his confused smile, not even realizing that he has been sitting in the bath for a long time. Oh, how radiant are these starched muslin curtains of the large window and how easily, how gracefully they move on their brass cornices from the gentle spring breeze, as if flying from the tall trees of the park! Now he is already wiping this really very unsightly body of his with a towel, but still must agree that life is beautiful and it can be fully enjoyed even in this bodily shell, for which in some strange way the most intimate intimacy with such an impenetrable a woman like Mrs. Mishkow.
Surprisingly, in the United States, some people believe that turtles bring good luck.
Mr. Mishkow's friend is sure of this, he himself is a stockbroker and every morning he places his turtle in front of a small staircase, if it tries to crawl up, then the securities will rise in price, hides in its shell - there will be no changes, but crawls back, which means the price will decrease.
As he told this, he gave the turtle to Mr. Mishkow.
Carrying it, Mr. Mishkow was worried that the turtle would pop out of its shell and he would drop it in surprise.
The children, daughter Helen and son John, were not happy when their father brought and laid a turtle on the floor in the room. The boy turns the turtle onto its “back” with the toe of his shoe, and it, pulling out its head and paws, tries to turn back. Helen, seeing this, laughs. Mr. Mishkow returns the animal to its normal position, he smiles in confusion and does not dare admit that he was given the turtle for good luck.
Mr. Mishkow has been married for nine years, but still does not understand how such a cold beauty became his wife. Returning home from her mother and her husband fiddling with the turtle, Mrs. Mishkow silently left, and then sent a short letter demanding a choice between her and the turtle. He didn’t want to lose his wife, so he promised to place the animal in another place.
After wandering around the city, Mr. Mishkow suddenly realized that the turtle was just an excuse for his wife and if it weren’t for her, there would be another. He returned home and put the turtle in front of his wife, she quickly got up, put on her hat and left. The animal leaned out of its shell and crawled around the room. “This is happiness,” thought Mr. Mishkow, because sometimes for happiness it is enough to get rid of what suppresses you and finally feel free.
Picture or drawing by Pirandello - Turtle
Other retellings for the reader's diary
- Summary of Confessions of Aurelius Augustine
“Confession” is a work that became the very first autobiography in European literature. It has been a model for Christian writers for many years. The work covers only part of the life of Augustine Aurelius
- Summary of Oster's bad advice
The book, addressed to naughty children, gives in poetic form original advice how to behave in different situations. For example, for a birthday you need to come without a gift, try to sit at the table closer to the cake
- Summary of Ekimov Boy on a bicycle
Khurdin was not at home in his native village for five years. He is very happy to return, to his native place, to his mother. In the village, his attention is attracted by a boy, about ten years old, on a bicycle. It's amazing how deftly he carries hay on his old bicycle, buckets of water
- Summary of Kuprin Juncker
It's the end of August. Alyosha Alexandrov recently graduated from the cadet corps. Alyosha was enrolled in the cadet infantry school named after Emperor Alexander II. He went to visit the Sinelnikovs to see young Yulia
- Summary of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
The main character, Huckleberry Finn, is raised by the Widow Douglas. The boy does not behave like a gentleman, so the woman makes a lot of efforts to re-educate him.