Regardless of the time of the year, he took the same, once-chosen route from home to school, even though a large section of it was terribly inconvenient: a muddy path running between garden fences, through a gully which stretched along the railroad embankment. The path led to a crossing which was an excruciating obstacle on Sergey Sergeyevich”s way to school. Checking a homemade schedule repeatedly, he would wait for the Moscow Express to pass, and after letting a river of cars pass, scurry across the railway right in front of the approaching mail train. To be late for class or to be run over: that was the dilemma he faced daily, dripping sweat, nervously working himself up until he gave himself a severe headache and painful shortness of breath. Still, the idea of changing the established route seemed never to occur to him.

Azie used to poke fun at his obsession with keeping the lab in order. For example, the beaker of hydrochloric acid bore a large square label with several titles, one under the other: ‘Muriatic Acid’, ‘Hydrochloric Acid’, ‘Hydrogen Chloride—Water Solution’, and ‘HCI’. Whenever a lesson plan involved using Bunsen burners, Sergey Sergeyevich would grow restless: not only would he give the students exhaustive instructions on how to use the hazardous equipment but he wouldn’t leave the class until the experiment had been completed.

“What if something should come of it?” Azie would tease him with a smile.

At that he would merely shrug his shoulders and turn away.

One day Azie asked him to bring something from the school attic. Sergey Sergeyevich froze and then finally muttered: “Yes…but I have never been there…I don’t like going to unfamiliar basements or attics…I’m sorry, Azalia Kharitonovna.”

Azie laughed and dropped it. She sent to the attic a nimble student, the envy of every boy in class, all of them dreaming of an excuse to execute one of the gorgeous Azie's orders or requests, no matter how small, even if it meant risking their necks.

That same evening she entered the lab, sat down on a chair, crossed her legs, lit a thin cigarette, and nodded in the direction of a book by Chekhov lying on a table between some beakers and test tubes:

“A man in a case reading ‘The Man in a Case’?” Sorry, Sergey Sergeyevich, but I’ve heard many people call you that.

“The blood-sucking spider,” he muttered, continuing to wash a beaker with a bottle brush in the sink.

“What? What spider?” Azie was a little lost.

“You must have not revisited that story for a while,” he said.

Having shaken the last drop of water out of the beaker and put it on the drying rack, he sat down facing Azie and having adjusted his glasses continued in the same unruffled tone of voice:

“Read it again, Azalia Kharitonovna. In the story, some healthy, constantly laughing people with red cheeks and black eyebrows monstrously hound a lonely miserable man who is no better but also no worse than they are. Yes, no better but no worse. Out of sheer boredom, they try to marry him to a red-cheeked, black-eyebrowed Ukrainian, whose brother detests the man in a case and compares him to a spider: the bloodsucking spider’. They get into a quarrel, and shortly after the man in a case dies.”

Sergey Sergeyevich slowly opened the book, turned several pages and nodded, “Here, please, listen to this. ‘One must confess’—(these are the narrator’s words, not Chekhov’s),—‘that to bury people like Byelikov is a great pleasure.’ He glanced at her over his glasses and continued:

“‘We returned from the cemetery in a good humor. But no more than a week had passed before life went on as in the past, just as gloomy, oppressive, and senseless…,’ You see, the problem was not the man in a case. That’s why…,” he coughed and looked away, “That’s why, or maybe that’s not why, as you please, but I ask you not to call me the man in a case. And please don’t try to worm your way into my confidence, even if you find yourself bored all of a sudden.”

He looked straight at her.

“I don’t bother you, do I? Or is it that I perform my duties inadequately? Then just say so. But please leave me alone, do you understand?”

He went into a coughing fit, pressed a kerchief to his mouth and mumbled: “Please leave…Don’t…Really, don’t…I beg you!”

Azie, bewildered, sprang up, rushed to the door, never ceasing to stare in amazement at Chemitch, and, not sure where to put the extinguished cigarette, suddenly slammed the door, started running, collected herself in a dead end of the hallway and turned around sharply. The hallway was empty. She was trembling, she wanted to cry, wanted to go back to that clumsy, tongue-tied bespectacled man and explain everything…But what was there to explain? Nothing like that had ever happened to her before. It was something baffling—disagreeably so, perhaps—at the very least something ponderous. Azie ran through the hallway on tiptoe, came down into the yard and, sobbing, raced home.
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