“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, talclass="underline" 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.
69
the Stroganov School of Painting: The School was founded in 1825 by Baron Sergei Grigoryevich Stroganov (1794–1882), and was known after 1860 as the Stroganov School for Technical Drawing, specializing in teaching the applied and decorative arts.
70
fruit dumpling… kvas soup… yoghurt… curd cheese – вареник, окрошка,
73
Not for nothing is a snake in the grass named after the grass snake –