It got dark in the evenings only towards midnight: the half-light in the west lay and lay over the motionless, quiet woods. On moonlit nights this half-light mixed strangely with the moonlight, motionless and enchanted too. And from the tranquillity that reigned everywhere, from the clarity of the sky and air, it forever seemed that now there would be no more rain. But there I would be, falling asleep after seeing her to the station[54] – and suddenly I would hear it: torrential rain crashing down again onto the roof with peals of thunder, darkness all around and vertical flashes of lightning. In the morning, on the lilac earth in the damp avenues of trees there was the play of shadows and blinding patches of sunlight, the birds called flycatchers would be clucking, the thrushes would be chattering hoarsely. By midday it would be sultry again, the clouds would gather and the rain would start to pour. Just before sunset it would become clear and, falling into the windows through the foliage, on my log walls there would tremble the crystalline golden grid of the low sun. At this point I would go to the station to meet her. The train would arrive, innumerable dacha-dwellers would tumble out onto the platform, there was the smell of the steam engine’s coal and the damp freshness of the wood, she would appear in the crowd with a string bag[55], laden with packets of hors d’oeuvres, fruits, a bottle of Madeira[56]… We dined amicably, alone. Before her late departure we would wander through the park. She would become somnambulistic and walk with her head leaning on my shoulder… The black pond, the age-old trees, receding into the starry sky… The enchanted light night, endlessly silent, with the endlessly long shadows of trees on the silvery lakes of the glades…
In June she went away with me to my village – without our having married, she began living with me as a wife, began keeping house. She spent the long autumn without getting bored, with everyday cares, reading. Of the neighbours, a certain Zavistovsky visited us most often, a solitary poor landowner who lived a couple of kilometres from us, puny, gingery, not bold, not bright – and not a bad musician. In the winter he began appearing at our house almost every evening. I had known him since childhood, but now I grew so used to him that an evening without him was strange for me. He and I played draughts, or else he played piano duets with her.
Just before Christmas I happened to go into town. I returned when the moon was already up. And going into the house, I could find her nowhere. I sat down at the samovar alone.
“And where’s the mistress, Dunya? Has she gone out for a walk?”
“I don’t know, sir. She’s been out ever since breakfast.”
“Got dressed and went,” said my old nanny gloomily, passing through the dining room without raising her head.
“She probably went to see Zavistovsky,” I thought. “She’ll probably be here with him soon – it’s already seven o’clock…” And I went and lay down for a while in the study, and suddenly fell asleep – I had been frozen all day in the sledge on the road. And I came to just as suddenly an hour later – with a clear and wild idea: “She’s abandoned me, hasn’t she! She’s hired a peasant in the village and left for the station, for Moscow – anything’s possible with her! But perhaps she’s come back?” I walked through the house – no, she hadn’t come back. The humiliation in front of the servants…
At about ten o’clock, not knowing what to do, I put on my sheepskin coat, took a rifle for some reason, and set off down the main road to see Zavistovsky, thinking: “As if on purpose, he hasn’t come today either, and I still have a whole terrible night ahead! Is it really true that she’s left, abandoned me? Of course not, it can’t be!” I walk, crunching along the well-trodden path amidst the snows, and the snowy fields are gleaming on the left beneath the low, meagre moon… I turned off the main road and went towards Zavistovsky’s estate: an avenue of bare trees leading towards it across a field, then the entrance to the yard, to the left the old, beggarly house; the house is dark… I went up onto the ice-covered porch, with difficulty opened the heavy door, its upholstery all in shreds – in the entrance hall is the red of the open, burning stove, warmth and darkness… But the reception hall is dark as well.
“Vikenty Vikentich!”
And noiselessly, in felt boots, he appeared on the threshold of the study, lit too only by the moon through the triple window.
“Ah, it’s you… Come in, please, come in… As you see, I’m sitting in the dusk, whiling the evening away without light…”
I went and sat on a lumpy couch.
“Just imagine, Muza’s disappeared somewhere…”
He remained silent. Then in an almost inaudible voice:
“Yes, yes, I understand you…”
“That is, what do you understand?”
And at once, also noiselessly, also in felt boots, with a shawl on her shoulders, from the bedroom adjoining the study came Muza.
“You’ve got a rifle,” she said. “If you want to shoot, shoot not at him, but at me.”
And she sat down on the other couch opposite.
I looked at her felt boots, at the knees under the grey skirt – everything was easily visible in the golden light falling from the window – and I wanted to shout out: “Better you kill me, I can’t live without you, for those knees alone, for the skirt, for the felt boots, I’m prepared to give my life!”
“The matter’s clear and done with,” she said. “Scenes are no use.”
“You’re monstrously cruel,” I articulated with difficulty.
“Give me a cigarette, dear,” she said to Zavistovsky.
He strained timorously towards her, reached out a cigarette case, started rummaging through his pockets for matches…
“You’re already speaking formally to me,” I said, gasping for breath, “you might at least not be so intimate with him in front of me.”
“Why?” she asked, raising her eyebrows, holding a cigarette with outstretched hand.
My heart was already pounding right up in my throat, my temples were thumping. I rose and, reeling, went away.
A Late Hour
Ah, what a long time it was since I’d been there, I said to myself. Not since I was nineteen. I had once lived in Russia, felt it to be mine, had complete freedom to travel anywhere I wanted, and it was no great trouble to go some three hundred kilometres. Yet I kept on not going, kept putting it off. And the years came and went, the decades. But now it’s no longer possible to put it off any more: either now or never. The one final opportunity must be taken, for the hour is late and nobody will come upon me.
And I set off across the bridge over the river, seeing everything all around a long way off in the moonlight of the July night.
The bridge was so familiar, as before, it was as though I’d seen it yesterday: crudely ancient, humped and as if not even of stone but sort of petrified by time into eternal indestructibility – as a schoolboy I thought it had already been there in Baty’s time[57]. The town’s antiquity, however, is spoken of only by a few traces of the town walls on the precipice below the cathedral and by this bridge. Everything else is simply old, provincial, no more. One thing was strange, one thing indicated that something had, after all, changed in the world since the time when I had been a boy, a youth: previously the river had not been navigable, but now it had probably been deepened, cleared out; the moon was to my left, quite a long way above the river, and in its uneven light, and in the flickering, trembling gleam of the water was the whiteness of a paddle steamer[58] which seemed empty – so silent was it – although all its portholes were lit up, looking like open but sleeping golden eyes, and were all reflected in the water as rippling gold columns: it was as if the steamer were actually standing on them. It had been like this in Yaroslavl, and in the Suez Canal, and on the Nile. In Paris the nights are damp, dark, there is a pinkish, hazy glow in the impenetrable sky. The Seine flows under the bridges like black pitch, but under them there also hang the rippling columns of reflections from the lamps on the bridges, only they are three-coloured: white, blue and red – Russian national flags. Here there are no lamps on the bridge, and it is dry and dusty. But up ahead on the hillside is the darkness of the town’s gardens, and protruding above the gardens is the fire-observation tower[59]. My God, what ineffable happiness it was! It was during a fire at night that I kissed your hand for the first time, and you gave mine a squeeze in reply – I shall never forget that secret accord. The whole street was black with people in ominous, abnormal illumination. I was visiting your house when the alarm was suddenly sounded, and everyone rushed to the windows and then out of the gate. The burning was a long way off, beyond the river, but it was terribly fervent, greedy, urgent. Thick clouds of smoke were belching out there like a crimson-black fleece, bursting out from them on high were red calico sheets of flame, and near to us, trembling, they were reflected in copper in the cupola of the Archangel Michael. And in the crush, in the crowd, amidst the alarmed, now compassionate, now joyous voices of the common people, who were flocking together from everywhere and not taking their widened eyes off the fire, I smelt the scent of your maidenly hair, neck, gingham dress – then suddenly made up my mind[60] and, turning quite cold, took your hand…
57
in Baty’s time: Baty Khan (1205–55) was the grandson of Genghis Khan and, like him, leader of the Golden Horde.