Part Two
Rusya
After ten o’clock in the evening, the Moscow-Sebastopol fast train stopped at a small station beyond Podolsk where it was not due to make a stop, waiting for something on the second track. On the train, a gentleman and a lady went up to a lowered window of the first-class carriage. A conductor with a red lamp in his dangling hand was crossing the rails, and the lady asked:
“Listen. Why are we standing still?”
The conductor replied that the oncoming express train was late.
The station was dark and sad. Twilight had fallen long before, but in the west, behind the station, beyond the blackening, wooded fields, the long summer Moscow sunset still gave off a deathly glow. Through the window came the damp smell of marshland. Audible from somewhere in the silence was the steady – and as though damp too – screeching of a corncrake.
He leant on the window, she on his shoulder.
“I stayed in this area during the holidays once,” he said. “I was a tutor on a dacha estate about five kilometres from here. It’s a boring area. Scrubland, magpies, mosquitoes and dragonflies. No view anywhere. On the estate you could only admire the horizon from the mezzanine[67]. The house was in the Russian dacha style, of course, and very neglected – the owners were impoverished people – behind the house was some semblance of a garden, beyond the garden not exactly a lake, not exactly a marsh, overgrown with sedge and water lilies, and the inevitable flat-bottomed boat beside the swampy bank.”
“And, of course, a bored dacha maiden whom you took out boating around the marsh.”
“Yes, everything as it’s meant to be. Only the maiden wasn’t at all bored. I took her out boating at night mostly, and it was even poetic, as it turned out. All night in the west the sky’s greenish, pellucid, and there, on the horizon, just like now, there’s something forever smouldering and smouldering… There was only one oar to be found, and that like a spade, and I paddled with it like a savage – first to the right, then to the left. The opposite bank was dark from the scrubland, but beyond it there was this strange half-light all night long. And everywhere unimaginable quietness – only the mosquitoes whining and the dragonflies flying around. I never thought they flew at night – it turned out that for some reason they do. Really terrifying.”
At last there was the noise of the oncoming train, it flew upon them with a clattering and wind, merging into a single golden strip of lighted windows, and rushed on by. The carriage immediately moved off. The carriage attendant entered the compartment, put the light on and began preparing the beds.
“Well, and what was there between you and this maiden? A real romance? You’ve never told me about her for some reason. What was she like?”
“Thin, tall. She wore a yellow cotton sarafan and peasants’ shoes woven from some multicoloured wool on bare feet.”
“In the Russian style as well then?”
“Most of all in the style of poverty, I think. Nothing to put on, hence the sarafan. Apart from that[68], she was an artist, she studied at the Stroganov School of Painting[69]. And she was like a painting herself, like an icon even. A long, black plait on her back, a swarthy face with little dark moles, a narrow, regular nose, black eyes, black brows… Dry and wiry hair which was slightly curly. With the yellow sarafan and the white muslin sleeves of her blouse, it all stood out very prettily. The ankle bones and the beginning of the foot in the woollen shoes – all wiry, with bones sticking out under the thin, swarthy skin.”
“I know the type. I had a friend like that at college. Probably hysterical.”
“It’s possible. Especially as she resembled her mother facially, and the mother, some sort of princess by birth, with oriental blood, suffered from something like manic depression. She’d emerge only to come to the table. She’d emerge, sit down and say nothing, cough a bit, without raising her eyes, and keep on moving first her knife, then her fork. And if she did suddenly start talking, then it was so unexpected and loud that it gave you a start.”
“And her father?”
“Taciturn and dry as well, tall: a retired military man. Only their boy, whom I was tutoring, was straightforward and nice.”
The carriage attendant left the compartment, said that the beds were ready, and wished us a good night.
“And what was her name?”
“Rusya.”
“What sort of name is that?”
“A very simple one – Marusya.”
“Well, and so were you very much in love with her?”
“Of course, terribly, so it seemed.”
“And she?”
He paused and replied drily:
“It probably seemed so to her as well. But let’s go to bed. I’m terribly tired after today.”
“Very nice! Just got me interested for nothing. Well, tell me, if only in two words, what brought your romance to an end and how.”
“Nothing at all. I left, and that was the end of the matter.”
“Why ever didn’t you marry her?”
“I evidently had a premonition that I’d meet you.”
“No, seriously.”
“Well, because I shot myself, and she stabbed herself with a dagger…”
And after washing and cleaning their teeth, they shut themselves into the tight space formed by the compartment, undressed, and with the delight of travellers lay down beneath the fresh, shiny linen of the sheets, onto similar pillows that kept slipping from the slightly raised bedhead.
The bluish lilac peephole above the door gazed quietly into the darkness. She soon dropped off, but he did not sleep, he lay smoking, and in his thoughts looked back at that summer…
She also had a lot of little dark moles on her body – that peculiarity was charming. Because she went about in soft footwear, without heels, her entire body undulated beneath the yellow sarafan. The sarafan was loose, light, and her long, girlish body was so free in it. One day she got her feet wet in the rain, ran into the drawing room from the garden, and he rushed to take off her shoes and kiss her wet, narrow soles – in the whole of his life there had not been such happiness. The fresh, fragrant rain rattled ever faster and heavier beyond the doors, open onto the balcony, in the darkened house everyone was sleeping after dinner – and how dreadfully he and she were frightened by some black and metallic-green-tinted cockerel, wearing a big, fiery crown, which ran in suddenly from the garden too, with a tapping of talons across the floor, at that most ardent of moments when they had forgotten any kind of caution. Seeing how they leapt up from the couch, it ran back into the rain, hastily and bending down, as though out of tactfulness, with its gleaming tail lowered…
At first she kept on scrutinizing him; whenever he began talking to her she blushed heavily and replied with sarcastic mutterings; at table she often annoyed him, addressing her father loudly:
“Don’t give him food to no purpose, Papa, he doesn’t like fruit dumplings. And he doesn’t like kvas soup either, nor does he like noodles, and he despises yoghurt, and hates curd cheese[70].”
In the mornings he was busy with the boy, she with housekeeping – the whole house was down to her. They had dinner at one, and after dinner she would go off to her room on the mezzanine or, if there was no rain, into the garden, where her easel stood under a birch tree, and, waving away the mosquitoes, she would paint from nature. Later she began going out onto the balcony, where he sat in a crooked cane armchair with a book after dinner, standing with her hands behind her back and casting glances at him with an indefinite grin:
“Might one learn what subtleties you’re so good as to be studying?”
“The history of the French Revolution.”
“Oh my God! I didn’t even know we had a revolutionary in the house!”
“But why ever have you given up your painting?”
“I’ll be giving it up completely at any time. I’ve become convinced of my lack of talent.”
“Show me something of your paintings.”
“And do you think you understand anything about painting?”
“You’re terribly proud.”
“I do have that fault…”
Finally one day she proposed going boating on the lake to him, and suddenly said decisively:
“The rainy season in our tropical parts seems to have ended. Let’s enjoy ourselves. True, our dugout’s quite rotten and the bottom has holes in it, but Petya and I have stopped up all the holes with sedge…”
The day was hot, it was sultry, the grasses on the bank, speckled with little yellow buttercup flowers had been stiflingly heated up by the moist warmth, and low above them circled countless pale-green butterflies.
He had adopted her constant mocking tone for himself and, approaching the boat, said:
“At long last[71] you’ve deigned to speak to me!”
“At long last you’ve collected your thoughts and answered me!” she replied briskly, and jumped onto the bow of the boat, scaring away the frogs, which plopped into the water from all directions, but suddenly she gave a wild shriek and caught her sarafan right up to her knees, stamping her feet:
“A grass snake[72]! A grass snake!”
He glimpsed the gleaming swarthiness of her bare legs, grabbed the oar from the bow, hit the grass snake wriggling along the bottom of the boat with it and, hooking the snake up, threw it far away into the water.
She was pale with an Indian sort of pallor, the moles on her face had become darker, the blackness of her hair and eyes seemingly even blacker. She drew breath in relief:
“Oh, how disgusting! Not for nothing is a snake in the grass named after the grass snake[73]. We have them everywhere here, in the garden and under the house… And Petya, just imagine, picks them up in his hands!”
For the first time she had begun speaking to him unaffectedly, and for the first time they glanced directly into one another’s eyes.
“But what a good fellow you are! What a good whack you gave it!”
She had recovered herself completely, she smiled and, running back from the bow to the stern, sat down cheerfully. She had struck him with her beauty in her fright, and now he thought with tenderness: but she’s still quite a little girl! Yet putting on an indifferent air, he took a preoccupied step across into the boat and, leaning the oar against the jelly-like lakebed, turned its bow forwards and pulled it across the tangled thicket of underwater weeds towards the green brushes of sedge and the flowering water lilies which covered everything ahead with an unbroken layer of their thick, round foliage, brought the boat out into the water and sat down on the thwart in the middle, paddling to the right and to the left.
“Nice, isn’t it?” she cried.
“Very!” he replied, taking off his cap, and turned round towards her: “Be so kind as to drop this down beside you, or else I’ll knock it off into this here tub, which, forgive me, does after all leak, and is full of leeches.”
She put the cap on her knees.
“Oh, don’t worry, drop it down anywhere.”
She pressed the cap to her breast:
“No, I’m going to take care of it!”
Again his heart stirred tenderly, but again he turned away and began intensifying his thrusting of the oar into the water that shone between the sedge and the water lilies. Mosquitoes stuck to his face and hands, the warm silver of everything all around was dazzling: the sultry air, the undulating sunlight, the curly whiteness of the clouds shining softly in the sky and in the clear patches of water between islands of sedge and water lilies; it was so shallow everywhere that the lakebed with its underwater weeds was visible, but somehow that did not preclude that bottomless depth into which the reflected sky and clouds receded. Suddenly she shrieked again – and the boat toppled sideways: she had put her hand into the water from the stern and, catching a water-lily stalk, had jerked it towards her so hard that she had tipped over along with the boat – he was scarcely in time to leap up and catch her by the armpits. She began roaring with laughter and, falling onto her back in the stern, she splashed water right into his eyes with her wet hand. Then he grabbed her again and, without understanding what he was doing, kissed her laughing lips. She quickly clasped her arms around his neck and kissed him clumsily on the cheek…
From then on they began boating at night. The next day she called him out into the garden after dinner and asked:
“Do you love me?”
He replied ardently, remembering the kisses of the day before in the boat:
“Since the first day we met!”
“Me too,” she said. “No, at first I hated you – I didn’t think you noticed me at all. But all that’s already in the past, thank God! This evening, as soon as everyone goes to bed, go there again and wait for me. Only leave the house as cautiously as possible – Mama watches my every step, she’s madly jealous.”
In the night she came to the shore with a plaid on her arm. In joy he greeted her confusedly, only asking:
“And why the plaid?”
“How silly you are! We’ll be cold. Well, get in quickly and paddle to the other bank…”
They were silent all the way. When they floated up to the wood on the other side, she said:
“There we are. Now come here to me. Where’s the plaid? Ah, it’s underneath me. Cover me up, I’m cold, and sit down. That’s right… No, wait, yesterday we kissed awkwardly somehow, now I’ll kiss you myself to begin with, only gently, gently. And you put your arms around me… everywhere…”
She had only a petticoat on under the sarafan. Tenderly, scarcely touching, she kissed the edges of his lips. He, with his head in a spin[74], threw her onto the stern. She embraced him frenziedly…
After lying for a while in exhaustion, she raised herself a little and, with a smile of happy tiredness and pain that had not yet abated, said:
“Now we’re husband and wife. Mama says she won’t survive my getting married, but I don’t want to think about that for the moment… You know, I want to bathe, I’m terribly fond of bathing at night…”
She pulled her clothes off over her head, the whole of her long body showed up white in the twilight, and she began tying a braid around her head, lifting her arms and showing her dark armpits and her raised breasts, unashamed of her nakedness and the little dark prominence below her belly. When she had finished, she quickly kissed him, leapt to her feet, fell flat into the water with her head tossed back and began thrashing noisily with her legs.
Afterwards, hurrying, he helped her to dress and wrap herself up in the plaid. In the twilight her black eyes and black hair, tied up in a braid, were fabulously visible. He did not dare touch her any more, he only kissed her hands and stayed silent out of unendurable happiness. All the time it seemed that there was someone there in the darkness of the wood on the shore, which glimmered in places with glow-worms, someone standing and listening. At times something would give out a cautious rustling there. She would raise her head:
“Hold on, what’s that?”
“Don’t be afraid, it’s probably a frog crawling out onto the bank. Or a hedgehog in the wood…”
“And what if it’s a wild goat?”
“What wild goat’s that?”
“I don’t know. But just think: some wild goat comes out of the wood, stands and looks… I feel so good, I feel like talking dreadful nonsense!”
And again he would press her hands to his lips, sometimes he would kiss her cold breast like something sacred. What a completely new creature she had become for him! And the greenish half-light hung beyond the blackness of the low wood and did not go out, it was weakly reflected in the flat whiteness of the water in the distance, and the dewy plants on the shore had a strong smell like celery, while mysteriously, pleadingly, the invisible mosquitoes whined and terrible, sleepless dragonflies flew, flew with a quiet crackling above the boat and further off, above that nocturnally shining water. And all the time, somewhere something was rustling, crawling, making its way along…
A week later, stunned by the horror of the utterly sudden parting, he was disgracefully, shamefully expelled from the house.
One day after dinner they were sitting in the drawing room with their heads touching, and looking at the pictures in old editions of The Cornfield[75].
“You haven’t stopped loving me yet?” he asked quietly, pretending to be looking attentively.
“Silly. Terribly silly!” she whispered.
Suddenly, softly running footsteps could be heard – and on the threshold in a tattered black silk dressing gown and worn morocco slippers[76] stood her crazy mother. Her black eyes were gleaming tragically. She ran in, as though onto a stage, and cried:
“I understand everything! I sensed it, I watched! Scoundrel, she shall not be yours!”
And throwing up her arm in its long sleeve, she fired a deafening shot from the ancient pistol with which Petya, loading it just with powder, scared the sparrows. In the smoke he rushed towards her, grabbed her tenacious arm. She broke free, struck him on the forehead with the pistol, cutting his brow open and drawing blood, flung it at him and, hearing people running through the house in response to the shouting and the shot, began crying out even more theatrically with foam on her blue-grey lips:
“Only over my dead body will she take the step to you! If she runs away with you, that same day I shall hang myself, throw myself from the roof! Scoundrel, out of my house! Maria Viktorovna, choose: your mother or him!”
She whispered:
“You, you, Mama…”
He came to, opened his eyes – still just as unwavering, enigmatic, funereal, the bluish-lilac peephole above the door looked at him from the black darkness, and still with the same unwavering, onward-straining speed, springing and rocking, the carriage tore on. That sad halt had already been left far, far behind. And all that there had been already fully twenty years ago – coppices, magpies, marshes, water lilies, grass snakes, cranes… Yes, there had been cranes as well, hadn’t there – how on earth had he forgotten about them! Everything had been strange in that amazing summer, strange too the pair of cranes of some sort which from time to time had flown in from somewhere to the shore of the marsh, and the fact that they had allowed just her alone near them and, arching their slender, long necks, with very stern but gracious curiosity, had looked at her from above when she, having run up to them softly and lightly in her multicoloured woollen shoes, had suddenly squatted down in front of them, spreading out her yellow sarafan on the moist and warm greenery of the shore, and peeped with childish fervour into their beautiful and menacing black pupils, tightly gripped by a ring of dark-grey iris. He had looked at her and at them from a distance through binoculars, and seen distinctly their small, shiny heads – even their bony nostrils, the slits of their strong, large beaks, which they used to kill grass snakes with a single blow. Their stumpy bodies with the fluffy bunches of their tails had been tightly covered with steel-grey plumage, the scaly canes of their legs disproportionately long and slender – those of one completely black, of the other greenish. Sometimes they had both stood on one leg for hours at a time in incomprehensible immobility, sometimes quite out of the blue[77] they had jumped up and down, opening wide their enormous wings; or otherwise they had strolled about grandly, stepping out slowly, steadily, lifting their feet, squeezing their three talons into a little ball and putting them down flat, spreading the talons – like a predator’s – apart, and all the time nodding their little heads… Though when she was running up to them, he had no longer been thinking of anything or seeing anything – he had seen only her outspread sarafan, and shaken with morbid languor at the thought of, beneath it, her swarthy body and the dark moles upon it. And on that their final day, on that their final time sitting together on the couch in the drawing room, over the old volume of The Cornfield, she had held his cap in her hands as well, pressed it to her breast, like that time in the boat, and had said, flashing her joyful black-mirrored eyes into his:
“I love you so much now, there’s nothing dearer to me than even this smell here inside the cap, the smell of your head and your disgusting eau de Cologne!”
Beyond Kursk, in the restaurant car, when he was drinking coffee and brandy after lunch, his wife said to him:
“Why is it you’re drinking so much? I believe that’s your fifth glass already. Are you still pining, remembering your dacha maiden with the bony feet?”
“Pining, pining,” he replied with an unpleasant grin. “The dacha maiden… Amata nobis quantum amabitur nulla![78]”
“Is that Latin? What does it mean?”
“You don’t need to know that.”
“How rude you are,” she said with an offhand sigh, and started looking out of the sunny window.
A Beauty
An official from the provincial revenue department[79], a widower, elderly, married a young thing, a beauty, the daughter of the local military commander. He was taciturn and modest, while she was selfassured. He was thin, tall, of consumptive build, wore glasses the colour of iodine, spoke rather hoarsely and if he wanted to say anything a little louder would break into a falsetto. And she was short, splendidly and strongly built, always well dressed, very attentive and organized around the house, and had a sharpness in the gaze of her wonderful blue eyes. He seemed just as uninteresting in all respects as a multitude of provincial officials, but had been wed to a beauty, in his first marriage too – and everyone simply spread their hands: why and wherefore did such women marry him?
And so the second beauty calmly came to hate his seven-year-old boy by the first one, and pretended not to notice him at all. Then the father too, out of fear of her, also pretended that he did not have, and never had had a son. And the boy, by nature lively and affectionate, became frightened of saying a word in their presence, and then hid himself away completely, made himself as though non-existent in the house.
Immediately after the wedding he was moved out of his father’s bedroom to sleep on a little couch in the drawing room, a small room next to the dining room, furnished with blue velvet furniture. But his sleep was restless, and every night he knocked his sheet and blanket off onto the floor, and soon the beauty said to the maid:
“It’s scandalous, he’ll wear out all the velvet on the couch. Make his bed up on the floor, Nastya, on that little mattress I ordered you to hide away in the late mistress’s big trunk in the corridor.”
And the boy, in his utter solitude in all the world, began leading a completely independent life, completely isolated from the whole house – inaudible, inconspicuous, identical from day to day, he sits meekly in a corner of the drawing room, draws little houses on a slate or reads in a halting whisper always one and the same little picture book, bought still in his late mother’s time, builds a railway out of matchboxes, looks out of the windows… He sleeps on the floor between the couch and a potted palm. He makes up his little bed himself in the evening, and diligently clears it away, rolls it up himself in the morning, and carries it off into the corridor to his mother’s trunk. All the rest of his bits of belongings are hidden away there too.
The Simpleton
The deacon’s son, a seminarist who had come to the village to stay with his parents for the holidays, was woken up one dark hot night by cruel bodily arousal and, lying there for a while, he inflamed himself still more with his imagination: in the afternoon, before dinner, he had been spying from a willow bush on the shore above a creek in the river on the lasses who had come there from work and, throwing their petticoats over their heads from their sweaty white bodies, with noise and guffawing, tilting their faces up and bending their backs, had flung themselves into the hotly gleaming water; then, unable to control himself, he got up, stole in the darkness through the lobby into the kitchen, where it was black and hot as in a heated stove, and groped, stretching his arms forwards, for the plank bed on which slept the cook, a beggarly lass without kith or kin[80] and reputed to be a simpleton, and she, in terror, did not even cry out. After that he slept with her the whole summer and fathered a boy, who duly began growing up with his mother in the kitchen. The deacon, the deacon’s wife, the priest himself and the whole of his house, the whole of the shopkeeper’s family and the village constable and his wife, they all knew whose this boy was – and the seminarist, coming to stay for the holidays, could not see him for bad-tempered shame over his own past: he had slept with the simpleton!
When he graduated – “brilliantly!” as the deacon told everyone – and again came to stay with his parents for the summer before entering the academy, they invited guests for tea on the very first holy day to show off before them their pride in the future academy student. The guests also spoke of his brilliant future, drank tea, ate various jams, and in the midst of their animated conversation the happy deacon wound up a gramophone that began to hiss and then shout loudly. All had fallen silent and started listening with smiles of pleasure to the rousing sounds of ‘Along the Roadway’[81], when suddenly into the room, beginning to dance and stamp, clumsily and out of time, there flew the cook’s boy, to whom his mother, thinking to touch everyone with him, had stupidly whispered: “Run and have a dance, little one.” The unexpectedness bewildered everyone, but the deacon’s son, turning crimson, threw himself upon him like a tiger and flung him out of the room with such force that the boy rolled into the entrance hall like a peg top[82].
The next day, at his demand, the deacon and the deacon’s wife gave the cook the sack[83]. They were kind and compassionate people and had grown very accustomed to her, had grown to love her for her meekness and obedience, and they asked their son in all sorts of ways to be charitable. But he remained adamant, and they did not dare disobey him. Towards evening, quietly crying and holding in one hand her bundle and in the other the little hand of the boy, the cook left the yard.
All summer after that she went around the villages and hamlets with him, begging for alms. She wore out her clothes, grew shabby, was baked in the wind and sun, became nothing but skin and bone, but was tireless. She walked bare-footed, with a sackcloth bag over her shoulder, propping herself up with a tall stick, and in the villages and hamlets bowed silently before every hut. The boy walked behind her with a bag over his little shoulder too, wearing her old shoes, battered and hardened like the down-at-heel things that lie about somewhere in a gully.
He was ugly. The crown of his head was large, flat and covered with the red hair of a boar, his little nose was squashed flat and had wide nostrils, his eyes were nut brown and very shiny. But when he smiled he was very sweet.
Antigone[84]
In June, a student set off from his mother’s estate for his uncle and aunt’s – he needed to pay them a visit, find out how they were, about the health of his uncle, a general who had lost the use of his legs. The student performed this service every summer and was travelling now with submissive serenity, unhurriedly reading a new book by Averchenko[85] in a second-class carriage, with a young, rounded thigh set on the edge of the couch, absent-mindedly watching through the window as the telegraph poles dipped and rose with their white porcelain cups in the shape of lilies-of-the-valley. He looked like a young officer – only his white peaked cap with a blue band was a student’s, everything else was to the military model: a white tunic, greenish breeches, boots with patent-leather tops, a cigarette case with an orange lighting wick.
His uncle and aunt were rich. When he came home from Moscow, a heavy tarantass was sent out to the station for him, a pair of draught horses and not a coachman but a workman. But at his uncle’s station he always stepped for a certain time into a completely different life, into the pleasure of great prosperity, he began feeling handsome, jaunty, affected. So it was now too. With involuntary foppishness he got into a light carriage on rubber wheels with three lively dark-bay horses in harness, driven by a young coachman in a blue, sleeveless poddyovka and a yellow silk shirt.
A quarter of an hour later, with a sprinkling of little bells softly playing and its tyres hissing across the sand around the flower bed, the troika flew into the round yard of an extensive country estate towards the perron of a spacious new house of two storeys. Onto the perron to take his things emerged a strapping servant wearing half-whiskers, a red-and-black striped waistcoat and gaiters. The student took an agile and improbably big leap out of the carriage: smiling and rocking as she walked, on the threshold of the vestibule there appeared his aunt – a loose, shapeless, tussore day coat[86] on a big, flaccid body, a large, drooping face, a nose like an anchor and yellow bags beneath brown eyes. She kissed him on the cheeks in a familiar way, with feigned joy he pressed his lips against her soft, dark hand, quickly thinking: lying like this for three whole days, and not knowing what to do with myself in my free time! Feignedly and hurriedly replying to her feignedly solicitous questions about his mother, he followed her into the large vestibule, glanced with cheerful hatred at the somewhat bent, stuffed brown bear with gleaming glass eyes standing clumsily at full height by the entrance to the wide staircase to the upper floor and obligingly holding a bronze dish for calling cards[87] in its sharp-clawed front paws, and suddenly even came to a halt in gratifying surprise: the wheelchair with the plump, pale, blue-eyed General, was being wheeled steadily towards him by a tall, stately beauty with big grey eyes in a grey gingham dress[88], a white pinafore and a white headscarf, all aglow with youth, strength, cleanliness, the lustre of her well-groomed hands and the matt whiteness of her face. Kissing his uncle’s hand, he managed to glance at the extraordinary elegance of her dress and feet. The General joked:
“And this is my Antigone, my good guide, although I’m not even blind, like Oedipus[89] was, and especially not to good-looking women. Make one another’s acquaintance, youngsters.”
She smiled faintly and replied with only a bow to the bow of the student.
The strapping servant with the half-whiskers and the red waistcoat led him past the bear and up the staircase with its gleaming dark-yellow wood and a red runner down the middle and along a similar corridor, took him into a large bedroom with a marble bathroom alongside – on this occasion a different one to before, and with windows looking onto the park, and not into the yard. But he walked without seeing anything. Spinning around in his head there was still the cheerful nonsense with which he had driven onto the estate – “my uncle, the most honest fellow”[90] – but already there was something else too: there’s a woman for you!
Humming, he began to shave, wash and get changed, and he put on trousers with straps under the feet, thinking:
“Such women really do exist! And what would you give for the love of such a woman! And how with such beauty can you possibly be pushing old men and women around in wheelchairs!”
And absurd ideas came into his head: to go on and stay here for a month, for two, to enter in secret from everyone into friendship with her, intimacy, to arouse her love, then say: be my wife, I’m all yours and for ever. Mama, Aunt, Uncle, their amazement when I declare to them our love and our decision to unite our lives, their indignation, then persuasion, cries, tears, curses, disinheritance – it all means nothing to me for your sake…
Running down the stairs to his aunt and uncle – their rooms were downstairs – he thought:
“What rubbish does enter my head, though! It stands to reason[91], you can stay here on some pretext or other… you can start unobtrusively paying court[92], pretend to be madly in love… But will you achieve anything? And even if you do, what next? How do you finish the story off? Really get married, do you?”
For about an hour he sat with his aunt and uncle in the latter’s huge study, with a huge writing desk, with a huge ottoman, covered with fabrics from Turkestan, with a rug on the wall above with crossed oriental weapons hanging all over it, with inlaid tables for smoking, and with a large photographic portrait in a rosewood frame under a little gold crown on the mantelpiece, on which was the free flourish, made with his own hand: Alexander[93].
“How glad I am, Uncle and Aunt, to be with you again,” he said towards the end, thinking of the nurse. “And how wonderful it is here at your place! It’ll be a dreadful shame to leave.”
“And who is it driving you out?” replied his uncle. “Where are you hurrying off to? Stay on till you’re sick of it.”
“It goes without saying[94],” said his aunt absent-mindedly. Sitting and chatting, he was continually expecting her to come in at any moment – a maid would announce that tea was ready in the dining room, and she would come to wheel his uncle through. But tea was served in the study – a table was wheeled in with a silver teapot on a spirit lamp, and his aunt herself poured. Then he kept on hoping she would bring some medicine or other for his uncle… But she simply did not come.
“Well, to hell with her,” he thought, leaving the study, and went into the dining room, where the servants were lowering the blinds on the tall, sunny windows, glanced for some reason to the right, through the doors of the reception hall, where in the late afternoon light the glass cups on the feet of the grand piano were reflected in the parquet, then passed to the left, into the drawing room, beyond which was the divan room; from the drawing room he went out onto the balcony, descended to the brightly multicoloured flower bed, walked around it, and wandered off down a shady avenue lined by tall trees… It was still hot in the sunshine, and there were still two hours left until dinner.
At half-seven a gong began howling in the vestibule. He was the first to enter the dining room, with its festively glittering chandelier, where beside a table by the wall there already stood a fat, clean-shaven cook all in starched white, a lean-cheeked footman in a frock coat and white, knitted gloves, and a little maid, delicate in a French way. A minute later, his aunt came in unsteadily like a milky-grey queen, in a straw-colored silk dress with cream lace, her ankles swelling above tight silk shoes, and, at long last[95], her. But after wheeling his uncle up to the table, she immediately, without turning round, glided out – the student only had time to notice a peculiarity of her eyes: they did not blink. His uncle made little signs of the cross over his light-grey, double-breasted general’s jacket, the student and his aunt devoutly crossed themselves standing up, then sat down ceremoniously and opened out their gleaming napkins. Washed, pale, with combed, wet, straggly hair, his uncle displayed his hopeless illness particularly obviously, but he spoke and ate a lot and with gusto, and shrugged his shoulders, talking about the war – it was the time of the Russo-Japanese War[96]: what the devil had we started it for! The footman waited with insulting apathy, the maid, assisting him, minced around on her elegant little feet, the cook served the dishes with the pomposity of a statue. They ate burbot soup, hot as fire, rare roast beef, new potatoes sprinkled with dill. They drank the white and red wines of Prince Golitsyn[97], the uncle’s old friend. The student talked, replied, gave his agreement with cheerful smiles, but like a parrot, and with the nonsense with which he had got changed a little while before in his head, thinking: and where is she having dinner, surely not with the servants? And he waited for the moment when she would come again, take his uncle away, and then meet with him somewhere, and he would at least exchange a few words with her. But she came, pushed the wheelchair away, and again disappeared somewhere.
In the night, the nightingales sang cautiously and assiduously in the park, into the open windows of the bedroom came the freshness of the air, the dew and the watered flowers in the flower beds, and the bedclothes of Dutch linen were cooling. The student lay for a while in the darkness and had already decided to turn his face to the wall and go to sleep, but suddenly he lifted his head and half-rose: while getting undressed, he had seen a small door in the wall by the head of the bed, had turned the key in it out of curiosity, had found behind it a second door and had tried it, but it had proved to be locked from the other side – now someone was walking about softly behind those doors, was doing something mysterious – and he held his breath, slipped off the bed, opened the first door, listened intently: something made a quiet ringing noise on the floor behind the second door… He turned cold: could it really be her room? He pressed up against the keyhole – fortunately there was no key in it – and saw light, the edge of a woman’s dressing table, then something white which suddenly rose and covered everything up… There was no doubt that it was her room – who ever else’s? They wouldn’t put the maid here, and Maria Ilyinishna, his aunt’s old maidservant, slept downstairs next to his aunt’s bedroom. And it was as though he were immediately taken ill[98] with her nocturnal proximity, here, behind the wall, and her inaccessibility. He did not sleep for a long time, woke up late and immediately sensed again, mentally pictured, imagined to himself her transparent nightdress, bare feet in slippers…
“This very day would be the time to leave!” he thought, lighting a cigarette.
In the morning they all had coffee in their own rooms. He drank, sitting in his uncle’s loose-fitting nightshirt, in his silk dressing gown, and with the dressing gown thrown open he examined himself with the sorrow of uselessness.
Lunch in the dining room was gloomy and dull. He had lunch only with his aunt, the weather was bad – outside the windows the trees were rocking in the wind, above them the clouds both light and dark were thickening…
“Well, my dear, I’m abandoning you,” said his aunt, getting up and crossing herself. “Entertain yourself as best you can, and do excuse your uncle and me with our illnesses, we sit in our own corners until tea. There’ll probably be rain, otherwise you could have gone out riding…”
He replied brightly:
“Don’t worry, Aunt, I’ll do some reading…”
And he set off for the divan room, where every wall was covered with shelves of books.
On his way there through the drawing room, he thought perhaps he should have a horse saddled after all. But visible through the windows were various rain clouds and an unpleasant metallic azure amidst the purplish storm clouds above the swaying treetops. He went into the divan room, cosy and smelling of cigar smoke – where, beneath shelves of books, leather couches occupied three whole walls – looked at the spines of some wonderfully bound books, and sat down helplessly, sank into a couch. Yes, hellish boredom. If only he could simply see her, chat with her… find out what sort of voice she had, what sort of character, whether she was stupid or, on the contrary, very canny, performing her role modestly until some propitious time. Probably a self-assured bitch who looks after herself very well… And most likely stupid… But how good-looking she is! And to spend the night alongside her again! He got up, opened the glass door onto the stone steps into the park, and heard the trilling of the nightingales through its rustling, but at that point there was such a rush of chill wind through some young trees on the left that he leapt back into the room. The room had gone dark, the wind was flying through those trees, bending their fresh foliage, and the panes of glass in the door and windows began sparkling with the sharp splashes of light rain.
“And it all means nothing to them!” he said loudly, listening to the trilling of the nightingales, now distant, now nearby, which reached him from all directions because of the wind. And at the same moment he heard an even voice:
“Good day.”
He threw a glance and was dumbstruck: she was standing in the room.
“I’ve come to change a book,” she said, cordially impassive. “It’s the only pleasure I have, books,” she added with an easy smile, and went up to the shelves.
He mumbled:
“Good day. I didn’t even hear you come in…”
“Very soft carpets,” she replied and, turning round, now gave him a lengthy look with her unblinking grey eyes.
“And what do you like reading?” he asked, meeting her gaze a little more boldly.
“I’m reading Maupassant now, Octave Mirbeau[99]…”
“Well yes, that’s understandable. All women like Maupassant. Everything in him is about love.”
“But then what can be better than love?”
Her voice was modest, her eyes smiled quietly.
“Love, love!” he said, sighing. “There can be some amazing encounters, but… Your name, nurse?”
“Katerina Nikolayevna. And yours?”
“Call me simply Pavlik,” he replied, becoming ever bolder.
“Do you think I’ll do as an aunt for you as well?”
“I’d give a lot to have such an aunt! For the time being I’m only your unfortunate neighbour.”
“Is it really a misfortune?”
“I could hear you last night. Your room turns out to be next to mine.”
She laughed indifferently:
“And I could hear you. It’s wrong to eavesdrop and spy.”
“How impermissibly beautiful you are!” he said, fixedly examining the variegated grey of her eyes, the matt whiteness of her face and the sheen of the dark hair beneath her white headscarf.
“Do you think so? And do you want not to permit me to be so?”
“Yes. Your hands alone could drive anyone mad…”
And with cheerful audacity he seized her right hand with his left. She, standing with her back to the shelves, glanced over his shoulder into the drawing room and did not remove the hand, gazing at him with a strange grin, as though waiting: well, and what next? He, not releasing her hand, squeezed it tightly, pulling it away downwards, and he gripped her waist with his right arm. She again glanced over his shoulder and threw her head back slightly, as though protecting her face from a kiss, but she pressed her curving torso against him. He, catching his breath with difficulty, stretched towards her half-open lips and moved her towards the couch. She, frowning, began shaking her head, whispering: “No, no, we mustn’t, lying down we’ll see and hear nothing…” and with eyes grown dim she slowly parted her legs… A minute later his face fell onto her shoulder. She stood for a little longer with clenched teeth, then quietly freed herself from him and set off elegantly through the drawing room, saying loudly and indifferently to the noise of the rain:
“Oh, what rain! And all the windows are open upstairs…”
The next morning he woke up in her bed – she had turned onto her back in bed linen rucked up and warmed in the course of the night, with her bare arm thrown up behind her head. He opened his eyes and joyfully met her unblinking gaze, and with the giddiness of a fainting fit sensed the pungent smell of her armpit…
Someone knocked hastily at the door.
“Who’s there?” she asked calmly, without pushing him aside. “Is it you, Maria Ilyinishna?”
“Me, Katerina Nikolayevna.”
“What’s the matter?”
“Let me come in, I’m afraid someone will hear me and they’ll run and frighten the General’s wife…”
When he had slipped out into his room, she unhurriedly turned the key in the lock.
“There’s something wrong with His Excellency, I think an injection needs to be given,” Maria Ilyinishna started whispering as she came in. “The General’s wife is still asleep, thank God, go quickly…”
Maria Ilyinishna’s eyes were already becoming rounded like a snake’s: while speaking, she had suddenly seen a man’s shoes beside the bed – the student had fled barefooted. And she also saw the shoes and Maria Ilyinishna’s eyes.
Before breakfast she went to the General’s wife and said she must leave all of a sudden: started calmly lying that she had received a letter from her father – the news that her brother was seriously wounded in Manchuria – that her father, by reason of his widowerhood, was completely alone in such misfortune…
“Ah, how I understand you!” said the General’s wife, who already knew everything from Maria Ilyinishna. “Well, what’s to be done, go. Only send a telegram to Dr Krivtsov from the station for him to come at once and stay with us until we find another nurse…”
Then she knocked at the student’s door and thrust a note upon him: “All’s lost, I’m leaving. The old woman saw your shoes beside the bed. Remember me kindly.”
At breakfast his aunt was just a little sad, but spoke with him as though nothing were wrong.
“Have you heard? The nurse is going away to her father’s. He’s alone and her brother is terribly wounded…”
“I’ve heard, Aunt. What a misfortune this war is, so much grief everywhere. And what was the matter with Uncle after all?”
“Ah, nothing serious, thank God. He’s a dreadful hypochondriac. It seems to be the heart, but it’s all because of the stomach…”
At three o’clock Antigone was driven away to the station by troika. Without raising his eyes, he said goodbye to her on the perron, as though having run out by chance to order a horse to be saddled. He was ready to cry out from despair. She waved a glove to him from the carriage, sitting no longer in a headscarf, but in a pretty little hat.
An Emerald[100]
The nocturnal dark-blue blackness of the sky, covered in quietly floating clouds, everywhere white, but beside the high moon pale blue. If you look closely, it isn’t the clouds floating, it’s the moon, and near it, together with it, a star’s golden tear is shed: the moon glides away into the heights that have no end, and carries the star away with it, ever higher and higher.
She is sitting sideways on the ledge of a wide open window and, with her head leaning out, is looking up – her head is spinning a little from the movement of the sky. He is standing at her knees.
“What colour is it? I can’t define it! Can you, Tolya?”
“The colour of what, Kisa?”
“Don’t call me that, I’ve told you a thousand times already…”
“I obey, Ksenya Alexandrovna, ma’am.”
“I’m talking about that sky between the clouds. What a marvelous colour! Both terrifying and marvellous. Now that is truly heavenly, there aren’t any like that on earth. A sort of emerald.”
“Since it’s in the heavens, of course it’s heavenly. Only why an emerald? And what’s an emerald? I’ve never seen one in my life. You simply like the word.”
“Yes. Well, I don’t know – maybe not an emerald, but a ruby… Only such a one as is probably only found in paradise. And when you look at it all like this, how can you possibly not believe that there is a paradise, angels, the throne of God…”
“And golden pears on willows…”
“How spoilt you are, Tolya. Maria Sergeyevna’s right in saying that the very worst girl is still better than any young man.”
“Truth itself speaks with her lips, Kisa.”
The dress she is wearing is cotton, speckled, the shoes cheap; her calves and knees are plump, girlish, her little round head with a small braid around it is so sweetly thrown back… He puts one hand on her knee, clasps her shoulders with the other, and half-jokingly kisses her slightly parted lips. She quietly frees herself, removes his hand from her knee.
“What is it? Are we offended?”
She presses the back of her head against the jamb of the window, and he sees that she is crying.
“But what’s the matter?”
“Oh, leave me alone…”
“But what’s happened?”
She whispers:
“Nothing…”
And jumping down from the window ledge, she runs away.
He shrugs his shoulders:
“Stupid to the point of saintliness!”
The Visitor
The visitor rang once, twice – it was quiet on the other side of the door, no reply. He pressed the button again, ringing for a long time, insistently, demandingly – heavy running footsteps were heard – and a short wench, sturdy as a fish, all smelling of kitchen fumes, opened up and looked in bewilderment: dull hair, cheap turquoise earrings in thick earlobes, a Finnish face covered in ginger freckles, seemingly oily hands filled with blue-grey blood. The visitor fell upon her quickly, angrily and cheerfully:
“Why on earth don’t you open up? Asleep, were you?”
“No, sir, you can’t hear a thing in the kitchen, the stove’s ever so noisy,” she replied, continuing to gaze at him in confusion: he was thin, swarthy, with big teeth, a coarse black beard and piercing eyes; he had a grey silk-lined overcoat on his arm, and a grey hat tilted back off his forehead.
“We know all about your kitchen! You’ve probably got a fireman boyfriend sitting with you!”
“No, sir…”
“Well, there you are, then, just you watch out!”
As he spoke, he quickly glanced from the entrance hall into the sunlit drawing room, with its rich red velvet armchairs and, between the windows, a portrait of Beethoven with broad cheekbones.
“And who are you?”
“How do you mean?”
“The new cook?”
“Yes, sir…”
“Fekla? Fedosya?”
“No, sir… Sasha.”
“And the master and mistress aren’t at home, then?”
“The master’s at the newspaper and the mistress has gone to Vasilyevsky Island… to that, what’s it called? Sunday school.”
“That’s annoying. Well, never mind, I’ll drop by again tomorrow. So, tell them, say: a frightening dark man came, Adam Adamych. Repeat what I said.”
“Adam Adamych.”
“Correct, my Flemish Eve. Make sure you remember. And for the time being, here’s what…”
He looked around again briskly and threw his coat onto a stand beside a chest:
“Come over here, quickly.”
“Why?”
“You’ll see…”
And in one moment, with his hat on the back of his head, he toppled her onto the chest and threw the hem of her skirt up from her red woollen stockings and plump knees the colour of beetroot.
“Sir! I’ll shout so the whole house can hear!”
“And I’ll strangle you. Be quiet!”
“Sir! For God’s sake… I’m a virgin!”
“That’s no matter. Well, here we go!”
And a minute later he disappeared. Standing by the stove, she cried quietly in rapture, then began sobbing, and ever louder, and she sobbed for a long time until she got the hiccups, right up until lunch, until someone rang for her. It was the mistress, young, wearing a gold pincenez, energetic, sure of herself and quick, who had arrived first. On entering, she immediately asked:
“Has anybody called?”
“Adam Adamych.”
“Did he leave a message?”
“No, ma’am… Said he’d drop by again tomorrow.”
“And why are you all tear-stained?”
“It’s the onions…”
At night in the kitchen, which gleamed with cleanliness, with new paper scallops along the edges of the shelves and the red copper of the scrubbed saucepans, a lamp was burning on the table; it was very warm from the stove, which had not yet cooled down; there was a pleasant smell of the remains of the food in a sauce with bay leaves, and of nice everyday life. Having forgotten to extinguish the lamp, she was fast asleep behind her partition – as she had lain down, without undressing, so had she fallen asleep, in the sweet hope that Adam Adamych would come again tomorrow, that she would see his frightening eyes and that, God willing, the master and mistress would once more not be at home.
But in the morning he did not come. And at dinner the master said to the mistress:
“Do you know, Adam has left for Moscow. Blagosvetlov told me. He must have popped in yesterday to say goodbye.”
Wolves
The dark of a warm August night, and the dim stars can barely be seen twinkling here and there in the cloudy sky. A soft road into the fields, rendered mute by deep dust, down which a chaise is driving with two youthful passengers: a young miss from a small estate and a grammar-school boy. Sullen flashes of summer lightning at times light up a pair of draught horses[101] with tangled manes, running evenly in simple harness, and the peaked cap and shoulders of a lad in a hempen shirt[102] on the box; they reveal for a moment the fields ahead, deserted after the hours of work, and a distant, sad little wood. In the village the evening before there had been noise, cries, the cowardly barking and yelping of dogs: with amazing audacity, when the people in the huts were still having supper, a wolf had killed a sheep in one of the yards and had all but[103] carried it off – the men had leapt out in time with cudgels at the din from the dogs and had won it back, already dead, with its side ripped open. Now the young miss is chuckling nervously, lighting matches and throwing them into the darkness, crying merrily:
“I’m afraid of the wolves!”
The matches light up the elongated, rather coarse face of the youth and her excited, broad-cheekboned little face. She has a red scarf tied right around her head in the Little Russian way[104], the open cut of her red cotton dress reveals her round, strong neck. Rocking along with the speeding chaise, she is burning matches and throwing them into the darkness as though not noticing the schoolboy embracing her and kissing her, now on the neck, now on the cheek, searching for her lips. She elbows him aside and, deliberately loudly and simply, having the lad on the box in mind, he says to her:
“Give the matches back. I’ll have nothing to light a cigarette with.”
“In a moment, in a moment!” she cries, and again a match flares up, then a flash of lightning, and the dark is still more densely blinding with its warm blackness, in which it constantly seems that the chaise is driving backwards. She finally yields to him with a long kiss on the lips, when suddenly, shaking them both with a jolt, the chaise seems to run into something – the lad reins the horses in sharply.
“Wolves!” he cries.
Their eyes are struck by the glow of a fire in the distance to the right. The chaise is standing opposite the little wood that was being revealed in the flashes of lightning. The glow has now turned the wood black, and the whole of it is shakily flickering, just as the whole field in front of it is flickering too in the murky red tremor from the flame that is greedily rushing through the sky, and that, in spite of the distance, seems to be blazing, with the shadows of smoke racing within it, just a kilometre from the chaise, and is becoming more hotly and menacingly furious, encompassing the horizon ever higher and wider – its heat already seems to be reaching their faces, their hands, and even the red transom of some burnt-out roof is visible above the blackness of the earth. And right by the wall of the wood there stand, crimsonly grey, three big wolves, and in their eyes there are flashes now of a pellucid green lustre, now a red one – transparent and bright, like the hot syrup of redcurrant jam. And the horses, with a loud snort, strike off suddenly at a wild gallop to the side, to the left, over the ploughed field, and the lad at the reins topples backwards, as the chaise, careering about with a banging and a crashing, hits against the tops of the furrows.
Somewhere above a gully the horses reared up once again, but she, jumping up, managed to tear the reins from the hands of the crazed lad. At this point she flew into the box with all her weight and cut her cheek open on something made of iron. And thus for the whole of her life there remained a slight scar in the corner of her lips, and whenever she was asked where it was from, she would smile with pleasure:
“The doings of days long gone![105]” she would say, remembering that summer long ago, the dry August days and the dark nights, threshing on the threshing floor, stacks of new, fragrant straw and the unshaven schoolboy with whom she lay in them in the evenings, gazing at the brightly transient arcs of falling stars. “Some wolves scared the horses and they bolted,” she would say. “And I was hot-blooded and reckless, and threw myself to stop them…”
Those she was still to loved, as she did more than once in her life, said there was nothing sweeter than that scar, like a delicate, permanent smile.
Calling Cards
It was the beginning of autumn, and the steamboat Goncharov was running down the now empty Volga. Early cold spells had set in, and over the grey floods of the river’s Asiatic expanse, from its eastern, already reddened banks, a freezing wind was blowing hard and fast against it, pulling on the flag at the stern, and on the hats, caps and clothes of those walking on the deck, wrinkling their faces, beating at their sleeves and skirts. The steamboat was accompanied both aimlessly and tediously by a single seagull – at times it would fly in an outward curve, banking on sharp wings, right behind the stern; at times it would slip away at an angle into the distance, off to the side, as if not knowing what to do with itself in this wilderness of the great river and the grey autumnal sky.
And the steamboat was almost empty – there was only an artel of peasants on the lower deck, while backwards and forwards on the upper one, meeting and parting, walked just three people: two from second class, who were both travelling to the same place somewhere and were inseparable, always strolling together, continually talking about something in a businesslike way, and like one another in their inconspicuousness, and a first-class passenger, a man of about thirty, a writer who had recently become famous, conspicuous in his not exactly sad, not exactly angry seriousness and in part in his appearance: he was tall, robust – he even stooped slightly, as some strong people do – well dressed and in his way handsome – a brown-haired man of that eastern Russian type that is sometimes encountered among Moscow’s merchant folk of long standing[106]; he was indeed one of those folk by origin, although he no longer had anything in common with them.
He walked on his own with a firm step, in expensive and sturdy footwear, in a black cheviot overcoat[107] and a checked English cap, paced backwards and forwards, now against the wind, now with the wind, breathing that powerful air of the autumn and the Volga. He would reach the stern, stand at it, gazing at the river’s grey ripples unfolding and racing along behind the steamboat, and, turning sharply, would again walk towards the bow, into the wind, bending his head in the puffed-out cap and listening to the rhythmic beating of the paddlewheel blades, from which there streamed a glassy canvas of roaring water. At last he suddenly paused and gave a sullen smile: there had appeared, coming up out of the stairwell from the lower deck, from third class, a rather cheap black hat, and underneath it the hollow-cheeked, sweet face of the woman whose acquaintance he had made by chance the previous evening. He set off towards her with long strides. Coming up onto the deck completely, she set off awkwardly in his direction too, and also with a smile, chased along by the wind, all aslant because of it, holding on to her hat with a thin hand, and wearing a light little coat, beneath which could be seen slender legs.
“How did you sleep?” he said loudly and manfully while still on the move.
“Wonderfully!” she replied, immoderately cheerful. “I always sleep like a log…[108]”
He retained her hand in his big one and looked into her eyes. She met his gaze with a joyful effort.
“Why did you sleep so long, my angel?” he said with familiarity. “Good people are already having lunch.”
“Daydreaming all the time!” she answered in a brisk manner, quite at odds with[109] her entire appearance.
“And what about?”
“All sorts of things!”
“Oh dear, watch out! ‘Thus little children they do drown, whilst bathing in the summer weather, the Chechen’s there across the river’[110].”
“And it’s the Chechen that I’m waiting for!” she replied with the same cheerful briskness.
“Better let’s go and have vodka and fish soup,” he said, thinking: she probably doesn’t even have the money to buy lunch.
She began stamping her feet coquettishly:
“Yes, yes, vodka, vodka! It’s hellish cold!”
And they set off at a rapid pace for the first-class dining room, she in front, he behind her, already examining her with a certain greed.
He had thought about her in the night. The day before, he had started speaking to her by chance and made her acquaintance by the steamboat’s side, as it had approached some high, black bank in the dusk, beneath which there was already a scattering of lights; he had then sat with her on deck, on a long bench running the length of the first-class cabins, beneath their windows with white slatted shutters, but had not sat for long and had regretted it in the night. To his surprise, he had realized in the night that he already wanted her. Why? Out of the habit of being attracted to chance and unknown travelling women while on the road? Now, sitting with her in the dining room, clinking glasses to the accompaniment of cold, unpressed caviar[111] and a hot kalach[112], he already knew why she attracted him so, and impatiently awaited the matter being brought to a conclusion. Because of the fact that all this – both the vodka and her familiarity – was in astonishing contradiction to her, he was inwardly getting more and more excited.
“Well then, another one each and that’ll do!” he says.
“Quite right, that’ll do,” she replies, striking the same note. “But it’s splendid vodka!”
Of course, she had touched him with the way she had become so confused the day before when he had told her his name, the way she had been stunned by this unexpected acquaintance with a famous writer – sensing and seeing that confusion was, as always, pleasant, it always disposes you favourably towards a woman, if she is not utterly plain and stupid; it immediately creates a certain intimacy between you and her, lends you boldness in your treatment of her and as though a certain right to her already. But it was not this alone that aroused him: he had apparently struck her as a man as well, while it was with all her poverty and simple-heartedness that she had touched him. He had already adopted an unceremonious way with female admirers, an easy and rapid transition from the first minutes of acquaintance with them to a freedom of manner, ostensibly artistic, and that affected simplicity of questioning: who are you? where from? married or not? He had asked questions like that the day before too – he had gazed into the dusk of the evening at the multicoloured lights on the buoys forming long reflections in the darkening water around the steamboat, at the campfires burning red on the rafts, he had sensed the smell of the smoke from them, thinking: “This needs to be remembered – straight away there seems to be the smell of fish soup in that smoke,” and had asked:
“May I learn your name?”
She had quickly told him her first name and patronymic.
“Are you returning home from somewhere?”
“I’ve been in Sviyazhsk at my sister’s. Her husband died suddenly, and she was left in a terrible situation, you see.”
At first she had been so confused that she had kept on looking somewhere into the distance. Then she had started answering more boldly.
“And are you married too?”
She had begun grinning strangely:
“I am. And, alas, not for the first year…”
“Why ‘alas’?”
“In my stupidity I hurried into it too early. You don’t have time to look around before your life’s gone by!”
“Oh, there’s still a long way to go until then.”
“Alas, not long! And I’ve still experienced nothing in life, nothing!”
“It’s still not too late to experience things.”
And at that point, with a grin, she had suddenly shaken her head:
“And I will!”
“And what is your husband? A civil servant[113]?”
She had waved her hand:
“Oh, a very good and kind but unfortunately completely uninteresting man… The secretary of our District Land Board[114]…”
“What a sweet, unfortunate woman,” he had thought, and had taken out his cigarette case:
“Would you like a cigarette?”
“Very much!”
And she had clumsily, but courageously lit up, inhaling quickly, in a woman’s way. And inside him once again pity for her had stirred, pity for her familiarity, and, together with the pity – tenderness, and a voluptuous desire to exploit her naivety and tardy inexperience, which, he had already sensed, would be sure to be combined with extreme boldness. Now, sitting in the dining room, he looked with impatience at her thin arms, at the faded and for that reason still more touching little face, at the abundant dark hair, done up any old how[115], which she kept on giving a shake, having taken off her black hat and thrown her little grey coat off her shoulders, off her fustian dress[116]. He was moved and aroused by the frankness with which she had talked to him the day before about her family life, about her age, no longer young, and by the fact that now she had suddenly plucked up her courage[117] and was doing and saying the very things that were so amazingly unsuited to her. She had become slightly flushed from the vodka; even her pale lips had turned pink, and her eyes had filled with a sleepily mocking gleam.
“You know,” she said suddenly, “there we were talking about dreams: do you know what I dreamt of most of all as a schoolgirl? Ordering myself calling cards! We’d become completely impoverished then, sold the remains of the estate and moved into town, and there was absolutely no one for me to give them to, but how I dreamt! It’s dreadfully silly…”
He gritted his teeth and took her firmly by the hand, beneath the delicate skin of which all the bones could be felt, but, not understanding him at all, she herself, like an experienced seductress, raised it to his lips and looked at him languorously.
“Let’s go to my cabin…”
“Let’s… It really is stuffy somehow in here, full of smoke!”
And, giving her hair a shake, she picked up her hat.
He put his arms around her in the corridor. Proudly, voluptuously, she looked at him over her shoulder. With the hatred of passion and love he almost bit her on the cheek. Over her shoulder, she Bacchically[118] presented her lips to him.
In the half-light of the cabin, with the slatted grille lowered at the window, hurrying to oblige him and make full and audacious use of all the unexpected happiness that had suddenly fallen to her lot with this handsome, strong and famous man, she at once unbuttoned and trampled on the dress that fell off her onto the floor, remaining, slim as a boy, in a light camisole, with bare shoulders and arms and white drawers, and he was agonizingly pierced by the innocence of it all.
“Shall I take everything off?” she asked in a whisper, utterly like a little girl.
“Everything, everything,” he said, growing ever more gloomy.
She submissively and quickly stepped out of all the linen she had thrown down onto the floor, and remained entirely bare, grey-lilac, with that characteristic of a woman’s body when it feels nervously cold, becomes taut and chill and gets covered in goosebumps, wearing nothing but cheap grey stockings with simple garters and cheap little black shoes, and she threw a triumphantly drunken glance at him, getting hold of her hair and taking the pins out of it. Turning cold, he watched her. In body she proved better, younger than might have been thought. Thin collarbones and ribs stood out in conformity with the thin face and slender shins. But the hips were even large. The belly, with a small, deep navel, was sunken, the prominent triangle of dark, beautiful hair beneath it corresponded with the abundance of dark hair on her head. She took the pins out, and the hair fell down thickly onto her thin back with its protruding vertebrae. She bent to pull up the slipping stockings – the small breasts with frozen, wrinkled brown nipples hung down like skinny little pears, delightful in their meagreness. And he made her experience that extreme shamelessness which so ill became her, and which for that reason so aroused him with pity, tenderness, passion… Between the slats of the grille at the window, jutting upwards at an angle, nothing could have been seen, but in rapturous horror she cast sidelong glances at them when she heard the sound of carefree voices and the footsteps of people passing along the deck right by the window, and this increased still more terribly the rapture of her depravity. Oh, how close by they were talking and walking – and it would never even have occurred to anyone what was going on a step away from them, in this white cabin!
Afterwards he laid her on the bunk like a dead woman. Gritting her teeth, she lay with closed eyes and already with mournful tranquility on her face, pale now, and utterly youthful.
Just before evening, when the steamboat moored at the place where she needed to disembark, she stood beside him, quiet, with lowered eyelashes. He kissed her cold little hand with that love which remains somewhere in the heart all one’s life, and she, without looking back, ran down the gangway into the rough crowd on the jetty.
Zoyka and Valeria
In the winter Levitsky spent all his free time at the Danilevskys’ Moscow apartment, and in the summer he started visiting them at their dacha in the pine forests along the Kazan road.
He had entered his fifth year as a student, he was twenty-four, but at the Danilevskys’ only the doctor himself referred to him as his “colleague”, while all the others called him Georges and Georgeik. By reason of solitude and susceptibility to love, he was continually becoming attached to one house of his acquaintance or another, soon becoming one of the family in it, a guest from one day to the next and even from dawn till dusk if classes permitted – and now this was what he had become at the Danilevskys’. And here not only the mistress of the house, but even the children, the very plump Zoyka and the big-eared Grishka, treated him like some distant and homeless relative. To all appearances he was very straightforward and kind, obliging and taciturn, although he would respond with great readiness to any word addressed to him.
Danilevsky’s door was opened to patients by an elderly woman in hospital dress, and they entered into a spacious hallway with rugs spread on the floor, furnished with heavy, old furniture, and the woman would put on spectacles, with pencil in hand would look sternly at her diary, and to some she would appoint a day and hour of a future surgery, while others she would lead through the high doors of the waiting room, and there they would wait a long time for a summons into the surgery next door, to a young assistant in a sugar-white coat for questioning and examination – and only after that would they get to Danilevsky himself, to his large surgery with a high bed by the rear wall, onto which he would force some of them to climb and lie down, in what fear turned into the most pitiful and awkward pose: everything troubled the patients – not only the assistant and the woman in the hallway, where, gleaming, the brass disk of the pendulum in the old long-case clock went from side to side with deathly slowness, but also all the grand order of this rich, spacious apartment, that temporizing silence of the waiting room, where nobody dared even sigh more than was necessary, and they all thought that this was some sort of utterly special, eternally lifeless apartment, and that Danilevsky himself, tall, thick-set, rather rude, was unlikely to smile even once a year. But they were mistaken: that residential part of the apartment, into which led double doors to the right from the hallway, was almost always noisy with guests, the samovar never left the table in the dining room, the housemaid ran around, adding to the table now cups and glasses, now little bowls of jam, now rusks and bread rolls, and even in surgery hours Danilevsky not infrequently ran over there on tiptoe through the hallway, and while the patients waited for him, thinking he was terribly busy with someone seriously ill, he sat, drank tea and talked about them to the guests: “Let ’em[119] wait a bit, damn ’em!” One day, sitting like that and grinning, throwing glances at Levitsky, at his wiry thinness and the certain stoop of his body, at his slightly bowed legs and sunken stomach, at his freckled face, covered with fine skin, his hawkish eyes and ginger, tightly curling hair, Danilevsky said:
“Own up now, colleague: there is some Eastern blood in you, isn’t there – Yiddish, for example, or Caucasian?”
Levitsky replied with his invariable readiness to give answers:
“Not at all, Nikolai Grigoryevich, there’s no Yiddish. There is Polish, there is, maybe, your own Ukrainian blood – after all, there are Ukrainian Levitskys too – and I heard from Granddad that there’s apparently Turkish too, but whether that’s true, Allah alone knows.”
And Danilevsky burst out laughing with pleasure:
“There you are, I guessed right after all! So be careful, ladies and girls, he’s a Turk, and not at all as modest as you think. And as you know, he falls in love in the Turkish way too. Whose turn is it now, colleague? Who now is the lady of your true heart?”
“Darya Tadiyevna,” Levitsky replied with a simple-hearted smile, quickly flooding with delicate fire – he often blushed and smiled like that.
Charmingly embarrassed too, so that even her currants of eyes seemed to disappear somewhere for an instant, was Darya Tadiyevna, nice-looking, with bluish down on her upper lip and along her cheeks, wearing a black silk bonnet after a bout of typhus, half-lying in an armchair.
“Well, it’s no secret for anyone, and perfectly understandable,” she said, “after all, there’s Eastern blood in me too…”
And Grisha began yelling voluptuously: “Ah, hooked, you’re hooked![120]” while Zoyka ran out into the next room and, cross-eyed, fell backwards on the run against the end of a couch.
In the winter Levitsky had, indeed, been secretly in love with Darya Tadiyevna, and before her had experienced certain feelings for Zoyka too. She was only fourteen, but she was already very developed physically, especially at the back, although her bare, blue-grey knees under a short Scottish skirt were still childishly delicate and rounded. A year before she had been removed from grammar school, and she had not been taught at home either – Danilevsky had found the beginnings of some brain disease in her – and she lived in carefree idleness, never getting bored. She was so affectionate with everyone that she even made them smack their lips. She was steep-browed, she had a naively joyous look in her unctuous blue eyes, as though she was always surprised at something, and always moist lips. For all the plumpness of her body, there was a graceful coquetry of movement about it. A red ribbon tied in her hair with its tints of walnut made her particularly seductive. She used to sit down freely on Levitsky’s knees – as though innocently, childishly – and probably sensed what he was secretly experiencing, holding her plumpness, softness and weight and trying to keep his eyes off her bare knees under the little tartan skirt. Sometimes he could not contain himself, and he would kiss her on the cheek as if in jest, and she would close her eyes with a languorous and mocking smile. She had once whispered to him in strict confidence what she alone in all the world knew about her mother: her mother was in love with young Dr Titov! Her mother was forty, but after all, she was as slim as a girl, and terribly young-looking, and the two of them, both her mother and the doctor, were so good-looking and tall! Later Levitsky had become inattentive to her – Darya Tadiyevna had begun appearing in the house. Zoyka seemed to become even merrier, more carefree, but never took her eyes off either her or Levitsky; she would often fling herself with a cry to kiss her, but so hated her that when Darya fell ill with typhus, she awaited daily the joyous news from the hospital of her death. And then she awaited her departure – and the summer, when Levitsky, freed from classes, would begin visiting them at the dacha along the Kazan road where the Danilevskys were living in the summer for the third year now: in a certain way she was surreptitiously hunting him down.
And so the summer arrived, and he began coming every week for two or three days. But then soon Valeria Ostrogradskaya came to stay, her father’s niece from Kharkov, whom neither Zoyka nor Grishka had ever seen before. Levitsky was sent to Moscow early in the morning to meet her at the Kursk Station, and he arrived from their station not on a bicycle, but sitting with her in the station cabman’s chaise, tired, with sunken eyes, joyously excited. It was evident that he had fallen in love with her while still at the Kursk Station, and she was already treating him imperiously as he pulled her things out of the chaise. However, running up onto the porch to meet Zoyka’s mother, she immediately forgot about him, and then did not notice him all day long. She seemed incomprehensible to Zoyka – sorting out her things in her room and afterwards sitting on the balcony at lunch, she would at times talk a very great deal, then unexpectedly fall silent, thinking her own thoughts. But she was a genuine Little Russian beauty! And Zoyka pestered her with unflagging persistence:
“And have you brought morocco ankle boots with you, and a woolen shawl to wear around your waist? Will you put them on? Will you let people call you Valyechka?”
But even without the Little Russian costume she was very good-looking: strong, well-formed, with thick, dark hair, velvety eyebrows which almost met, stern eyes the colour of black blood, a hot, dark flush on her tanned face, a bright gleam of teeth and full, cherry-red lips, above which she too had a barely visible little moustache, only not down, like Darya Tadiyevna had, but pretty little black hairs, just like the ones between her eyebrows. Her hands were small but also strong and evenly tanned, as if lightly smoked. And what shoulders! And on them, how transparent were the pink silk ribbons holding the camisole beneath her fine white blouse! Her skirt was quite short, perfectly simple, but it fitted her amazingly well. Zoyka was so enraptured that she was not even jealous over Levitsky, who stopped going away to Moscow and did not leave Valeria’s side, happy that she had let him close to her, had also started calling him Georges, and was forever ordering him to do things. Thereafter the days became perfectly summery and hot, guests came more and more frequently from Moscow, and Zoyka noticed that Levitsky had been dismissed, and was sitting beside her mother more and more, helping her to prepare raspberries, and that Valeria had fallen in love with Dr Titov, with whom her mother was secretly in love. In general, something had happened to Valeria – when there were no guests, she stopped changing her smart blouses, as she had done before; she would sometimes go around from morning till evening in Zoyka’s mother’s peignoir, and she had a fastidious air. It was terribly intriguing: had she kissed Levitsky before falling in love with Dr Titov or not? Grishka swore he had seen her once before dinner walking with Levitsky down the avenue of fir trees after bathing, wrapped up in a towel like a turban, and how Levitsky, stumbling, had been dragging her wet sheet along, and saying something very, very rapidly, and how she had paused, and he had suddenly caught her by the shoulder and kissed her on the lips:
“I pressed up behind a fir tree and they didn’t see me,” said Grishka fervently with his eyes popping out, “but I saw everything. She was terribly pretty, only all red, it was still terribly hot, and, of course, she’d spent too long bathing, I mean, she always sits in the water and swims for two hours at a time – I spied on that too – naked she’s simply a naiad[121], and he was talking and talking, really and truly like a Turk…”
Grishka swore it, but he liked inventing all sorts of silly things, and Zoyka both did and did not believe it.
On Saturdays and Sundays, the trains that came to their station from Moscow were crammed full of people, weekend guests of the dacha-dwellers, even in the morning. Sometimes there was that delightful rain through sunshine, when the green carriages were washed down by it and shone like new, the white clouds of smoke from the steam engine seemed especially soft, and the green tops of the pines, standing elegant and thick behind the train, drew circles unusually high in the bright sky. The new arrivals vied with each other to grab the cab men’s chaises on the rutted hot sand behind the station, and drove with the joy of the dacha down the sandy roads in the cuttings of the forest under the ribbons of sky above them. The complete happiness of the dacha set in when in the forest, which endlessly hid the dry, slightly undulating land all around. Dacha-dwellers taking their Muscovite friends for a walk said that bears were the only thing lacking here, they declaimed, “Both of resin and wild strawb’rries smells the shady wood,”[122] and hallooed one another, enjoyed their summer well-being, their idleness and freedom of dress – kosovorotkas with embroidered hems worn outside of trousers[123], the long braids of coloured belts, peaked canvas caps: the odd Muscovite acquaintance, some professor or journal editor, bearded and wearing glasses, was not even immediately recognizable in such a kosovorotka and such a cap.
Amidst all this dacha happiness Levitsky was doubly unhappy. Feeling himself from morning till evening pitiful, deceived, superfluous, he suffered all the more for understanding very well how vulgar his unhappiness was. Day and night he had one and the same thought: why, why had she so quickly and pitilessly let him close to her, made him not quite her friend, not quite her slave, and then her lover, who had had to be content with the rare and always unexpected happiness of kisses alone, why had she sometimes been intimate with him, sometimes formal, and how had she had the cruelty so simply and so easily to cease even noticing him all of a sudden on the very first day of her acquaintance with Titov? He was burning up with shame over his brazen loitering on the estate too. Tomorrow he should disappear, flee in secret to Moscow, hide from everyone with this ignominious unhappiness of deceived dacha love, so evident even for the servants in the house! But at this thought he was so pierced by the recollection of the velvetiness of her cherry-red lips that he lost the power of his arms and legs. If he was sitting on the balcony alone and she by chance was passing, she would with excessive naturalness say something particularly insignificant to him as she went – “Now where ever can my aunt be? You haven’t seen her?” – and he would hasten to answer her in the same tone, while ready to break into sobs[124]
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