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]?”
107
cheviot overcoat – шевиотовое пальто
110
Thus little children… across the river: An inaccurate quotation from the ‘Circassian Song’ in Alexander Pushkin’s narrative poem A Prisoner in the Caucasus (1822).