“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.
78
Amata… nulla: From Poem 8 by Gaius Valerius Catullus (c.84–c.54 bc): “She who was loved by me as none will ever be loved” (Latin)
79
provincial revenue department – казенная палата
81
Along the Roadway: A well-known Russian folk song.