The sleepwaker

My husband is an idle person. I, on the other hand, am the complete opposite, working hard all day long. I am a lawyer by profession. However, it is not accurate to say that my husband is idle. Yes, my husband does nothing, but he is not idle, but busy all day long, he is one of the least idle men I know. What is he busy with? Damn it! He spends all his energy on countless other affairs. In a word, cheating on me. Does it mean that to have fun, and to have fun with many women in turn - I counted the eighth one not long ago - is to be idle? Whoever says so, he doesn't know what pleasure is all about. My husband spends all his time, idle or not, even in his dreams, not for anything else but to think up tricks to hide from me and cheat on every woman he gets his hands on.

After the first five years of marriage, I put up with his womanizing, and then, I finally decided to take revenge. Of course, I could have asked for a divorce, but, the bad thing is, I love him, the more he is slutty, the more I love him. Thus, seeing the path to divorce blocked by love, I was driven by a peculiar, yet logical, feeling to take another path of revenge. Simply put, I decided to kill my husband.

I developed a strange problem, namely sleepwalking. During the night, I used to roll over and sit up from bed with my pale face poking outward, my gray eyes wide open and shining with melancholy, my fluffy curls falling over my shoulders, my hands leaving my nightgown open and my weary body almost naked as I walked around the bedroom. My husband and maid Lena knew that I suffered from this strange problem, so they were always careful not to disturb me. Usually, my habit is to walk from room to room, open the drawers one by one, move the furniture in the room, avoid colliding with the furniture every time as if by a miracle, and then return to the bedroom and lie down to sleep. Everyone in the house knew that I was a sleepwalker because late one night I went to the stairway and rang the electric bell on my neighbor's door.

It is well known that sleepwalkers are capable of incredibly complex things in their sleep, and it takes extraordinary awareness and talent to do these things even when they are sane. In short, the sleepwalker is like an actor performing on stage, who has completely integrated with the role he is playing. In him, some talents are maximized and others are repressed. The dream for the sleepwalker is like the artistic fiction for the actor, enabling him to sharpen his senses and to move just right and with precision. Now I imagine pretending to be sleepwalking to do something risky: instead of moving the furniture, opening the door, rummaging around in the drawers, I simply point my pistol at my husband and shoot him dead. Sleepwalkers are capable of anything, not to mention that shooting is much easier than pacing around the house in the dark; then, as if nothing had happened, I would return to my bedroom and lie down to sleep. The next morning, upon awakening, I would find, with a despair not difficult to imagine, that I was a widow.

When all was said and done. I picked the day. As night fell, I was alone with my dinner. On the pretext that he was going to a party with his clean-cut boyfriend who graduated from the same college and department in the same year, my husband hypocritically said "I'm sorry" and went off to meet a woman he was seeing. After dinner, I sat in the living room, smoking, watching TV, and idly browsing newspapers and pictorials for four hours. I felt uncomfortable, my muscles were swollen, as if in a state of numbness. My mind was empty and I didn't think about anything; perhaps I had entered a state of sleepwalking.

At one o'clock in the morning, my husband came back. In addition to humiliation, I waited for nothing but aggression; he did not take me seriously, not to meet me in the living room, kissed me good night, but went straight back to his bedroom. I curled up in my room, took off my coat, lay in bed, smoked, and spent another four hours in the dark. I find it strange that I wouldn't have known I was smoking if I hadn't seen the smoke rising from the burning cigarette, because I didn't taste the cigarette at all. At five o'clock in the morning, according to the preconceived plan, I got up.

I took off my shirt and put on my pajamas naked. I do this routine every time I have a sleepwalking episode. However, this time something new appeared: in my pocket sank one of my husband's pistols, which I had stolen from his collection of small wooden cabinets. I hesitated for a moment, and then, driven by a strong desire, like an actor on stage, I struck out to the bedroom door, opened it, and entered the hallway. To be honest, it was more like a narrow passage between two rows of furniture and bookshelves than a hallway. I twisted on the electric light, and in the dim light I looked like a marble statue, serious, with my unkempt curls falling over my shoulders, my eyes wide, my pajamas open with my hands, my breasts bared, my head slightly tilted back, and walking straight ahead. I knew that this was how I looked when I was having a sleepwalking episode, because my husband and Lena had described it to me many times.

I walked step by step to the end of the corridor, where the maid Lena's bedroom was; she was half an old woman, but fat and of Slavic origin. I deliberately wanted her to see me like this, so that she could provide me with favorable proof afterwards. I gently turned the handle of the bedroom door, pushed it open, and stood stiff as a corpse on the threshold. Suddenly, I was shocked to find, by the light from the corridor, that there was not even a single figure on Lena's messy bed. The blanket was lifted to one side, as if Lena had gotten up in a hurry. I don't know what the reason was, but all of a sudden, a feeling of distraction and confusion came over me, and I felt in a trance that something had gone wrong in my plan.

I continued to overtake the room slowly and stiffly like a solemn robot, searching Lena's lavatory, and ours, but not finding her. Where could my maid have gone at five o'clock in the morning? It seemed that some mysterious and absurd thing might have cracked objective reality. This suspicion was well-founded. However, I still decided to go ahead with my original plan, even without Lena to testify on my behalf.

I reentered the corridor and did what they usually described to me, the customary actions of sleepwalking episodes: stopping in my tracks, copying a book from the shelf at random, opening it, pretending to browse it, and then putting it back in its place. This sequence of actions was deliberately done for someone who might be spying on my movements; but who could this person be?

I walked up to my husband's bedroom, carefully turned the handle of the door, opened it and stepped inside. I was shocked and stunned - Lena, the old but energetic and overactive Lena, who had disappeared during the night, was lying in my husband's bed. I saw her bare breasts, with her head in a mess of jute hair, resting on my husband's arm, gazing at him with an undisguised smugness; and my husband, with his head buried in the pillow, lying on his back, with the upper half of his body exposed outside the covers. Once again, I felt that something unpleasant had happened in my plan, and the scene I saw at the moment was indeed something I had not anticipated, and frankly, something I could not have foreseen. I had no time, however, to experience further this unpleasant emotion. This new and appallingly despicable act of my husband took place between him and the maid, a woman who had long since passed her youth, and who, so to speak, had my trust in the family and whom I had thought loved me. This unbelievable, yet true, horrible yet logical and despicable act should naturally be punished. I clutched the pistol in my pocket, slowly pulled it out, and aimed it at the bed. There was a bang ...... and I woke up from my dream.

I went to the window and stood woodenly, elbows propped up on the windowsill, gazing out over the garden. The dark green ivy that densely climbed the fence caught my eye. The light of a street lamp reflected a corner of the garden: a marble bench, dull black from the long dampness, surrounded by a small laurel grove, with a thin spring gushing from the rockery, shooting upwards, shimmering and glowing, and then falling into the black-colored pool. This is the most secluded, deepest, near-break-of-dawn moment of the night. If it weren't for the sound of the spring trickling, I would have thought it was a dream. The cold night air sent a shiver down my spine. I clutched my pajamas on my chest. Suddenly, I realized that there was no pistol in my coat pocket.

It was clear that this was a sleepwalking episode that I was routinely guilty of. In my dream, I got up from bed, went to the window, pulled open the blinds and looked out, but was the plan to shoot my husband really a feigned sleepwalking episode? No doubt, it was just a dream within a dream. I was pretending to have a sleepwalking attack in my dream, walking around the house and taking action. However, something in the dream made me realize that I was not pretending to be sleepwalking, but was actually dreaming. What was that all about? My husband's strange fornication with Lena turned out to be an irrational imagination caused by my morbid, insane jealousy.

However, I still didn't understand any of it. I recalled that my husband's womanizing had indeed developed to the point of fornicating with older women, once with a middle-aged maid. Perhaps I did fire the gun; perhaps, after firing it, I dropped it and went back to my bedroom, where I finally came to my senses. Anyway, God only knows. Jealousy and sleepwalking combined to produce mirage-like visions that prevented me from rejecting the last hypothesis.

Now I was afraid to leave the window, unable to muster the courage to see "what was going on". I stood there with my elbows propped on the windowsill, looking out over the garden. Maybe it was a dream, too, and I hadn't woken up yet.