“After the Death of Ivan Ilyich” by Sonja Srinivasan (Fiction ’19)

After the last guest had tearfully departed and the last crumbs wiped from the tables, after Gerasim had swept the flecks from the muddy boots off the floor and the housekeeper had scraped up the molten wax that dripped onto the woodwork, Praskovya Fëdorovna retired to bed upstairs with a glass of tea with jam. It would give her a few hours to stall the inevitable: her husband’s funeral, the interment, and the aftermath. Her maid Nadezhda had implored her to get some sleep–“Madame, you must! You have been awake non-stop for two days!”–but sleep evaded her, drifting in and out of her body like a phantom, not allowing her to remain coherent and conscious or completely at rest. But one could not sleep well in one’s home when things would no longer be the same.