The Kiss

In a dark room he has wandered into by mistake, a pair of soft, fragrant arms close around the neck of Ryabovich, an artillery officer so plain and shy that no woman has ever looked at him twice. A warm cheek touches his, a kiss lands, and then a small cry of horror as the woman realizes she has the wrong man and flees before he can see her face. The spot on his cheek tingles as if from peppermint, and that tingle becomes the ruling fact of his life. Chekhov lets him do what we all do with a scrap of unearned tenderness, inflate it into a whole future, reassembling the unseen woman from the perfume and the dark, rehearsing a return, a recognition, a life. When the brigade marches back to the estate months later, the river runs on indifferently and nothing waits for him there. The cruelty is also the beauty: Chekhov never once laughs at him for needing it so badly.