The blanket on Nanny’s bed also seemed to be stirring. Maybe a robber had got in and was now lying hidden under the blanket, stealing the gold…
LOVE
It was the wonderful days of my ninth spring—days that were long and full to the brim, saturated with life.
Everything in those days was interesting, important and full of meaning. Objects were new. And people were wise; they knew an astonishing amount and were keeping their great dark secrets until some unknown day in the future.
The morning of each long day began joyfully: thousands of small rainbows in the soapy foam of the wash bowl; a new, brightly coloured light dress; a prayer before the icon, behind which the stems of pussy willow were still fresh; tea on a terrace shaded by lemon trees that had been carried out from the orangery in their tubs; my elder sisters, black-browed and with long plaits, only just back from boarding school for the holidays and still seeming strange to me; the slap of washing bats from the pond beyond the flower garden, where the women doing the laundry were calling out to one another in ringing voices; the languid clucking of hens behind a clump of young, still small-leaved lilac. Not only was everything new and joyful in itself but it was, moreover, a promise of something still more new and joyful.
And it was during this spring, the ninth of my life, that my first love came, revealed itself and left—in all its fullness, with rapture and pain and disenchantment, with all that is to be expected of any true love.
Four peasant girls, Khodoska, Paraska, Pidorka and Khovra—all wearing coin necklaces, Ukrainian wraparound skirts and linen shirts with embroidered shoulders—were weeding the garden paths. They scraped and hacked at the fresh black earth with their spades, turning over thick, oily sods and tearing away crackly, tenacious rootlets as thin as nerves.
For hours on end, until I was called, I would stand and watch, and breathe in the heavy damp smell of the earth.
Necklaces dangled and clinked, arms red from the year’s first strong sun slid lightly and gaily up and down the spades’ wooden handles.
And then one day, instead of Khovra, who was fair and stocky, with a thin red band around her head, I saw a new girl—tall and lithe, with narrow hips.
“Hey, new girl, what’s your name?” I asked.
A dark head encircled by thick, four-stranded plaits and with a narrow white parting down the centre turned towards me, and dark, mischievous eyes looked at me from beneath curved eyebrows that met in the middle, and a merry red mouth smiled at me.
“Ganka!”
And her teeth gleamed—even, white and large.
She said her name and laughed, and the other girls all laughed, and I felt merry too.
This Ganka was astonishing. Why was she laughing? And what was it about her that made me feel so merry? She was not as well dressed as smart Paraska, but her thick striped skirt was wound so deftly round her shapely hips, her red woollen sash gripped her waist so firmly and vibrantly and her bright green ribbon fluttered so arrestingly by the collar of her shirt that it was hard to imagine anything prettier.
I looked at her, and every move, every turn of her supple dark neck sang like a song in my soul. And her eyes flashed again, mischievous, as if tickling me; they laughed, then looked down.
I also felt astonished by Paraska, Khodoska and Pidorka—how could they keep their eyes off her? How did they dare behave as if they were her equals? Were they blind? But then even she herself seemed to think she was no different from the others.
I looked at her fixedly, without thoughts, as if dreaming.
From far away a voice called my name. I knew I was being called to my music lesson, but I didn’t answer.
Then I saw Mama going down a nearby avenue with two smartly dressed ladies I didn’t know. Mama called to me. I had to go and drop a curtsy to them. One of the ladies lifted my chin with a little hand sheathed in a perfumed white glove. She was gentle, all in white, all in lace. Looking at her, I suddenly felt Ganka was coarse and rough.
“No, Ganka’s not nice,” I thought.
I wandered quietly back to the house.
Placid, merry and carefree, I went out the following morning to see where the girls were weeding now.
Those sweet dark eyes met me as gaily and affectionately as if nothing had happened, as if I had never betrayed them for a perfumed lady in lace. And again the singing music of the movements of her slender body took over, began to enchant.
The conversation at breakfast was about yesterday’s guest, Countess Mionchinskaya. My eldest brother was sincerely enraptured by her. He was straightforward and kind but, since he was being educated at the lycée, he felt it necessary to lisp and drawl and slightly drag his right foot as he walked.[1] And, doubtless afraid that a summer deep in the country might erase these stigmata of the dandy, he greatly surprised us younger ones with his strange mannerisms.
“The countess is divi-i-inely beau-utiful!” he said. “She was the to-oast of the se-ea-son.”
My other brother, a cadet at the military academy, did not agree. “I don’t see anything so special about her. She may put on airs, but she’s got the mitts of a peasant—the mitts of a baba who’s been soaking neckweed.”[2]
The first brother poured scorn on this: “Qu’est-ce que c’est mitt? Qu’est-ce que c’est baba? Qu’est-ce que c’est neckweed?”
“But I’ll tell you who really is a beauty,” the second brother continued, “and that’s Ganka who works in the garden.”
“Hah!”
“She’s badly dressed, of course, but give her a lace gown and gloves and she’ll beat your countess hands down.”
My heart started beating so fast I had to close my eyes.
“How can you talk such rubbish?” said my sister Vera, taking offence on the countess’s behalf. “Ganka’s coarse, and she has no manners. She probably eats fish with a knife.”
I was in torment. It seemed as if something, some secret of mine, was about to be revealed—but what this secret was I did not even know myself.
“Although that, I think we can say, has nothing to do with it,” said the first brother. “Helen of Troy didn’t have French governesses, and she ate fish with her fingers—not even with a knife—yet her renown as a world beauty remains unchallenged. What’s the matter, Kishmish? Why have you gone so red?”
“Kishmish” was my nickname.[3] I answered in a trembling voice, “Leave me in peace. I’m not doing you any harm. But you… you’re always picking on me.”
In the evening, lying on the sofa in the dark drawing room, I heard my mother in the hall; she was playing a piece I loved, the cavatina from the opera Martha.[4] Something in the soft, tender melody evoked—called up within me—the same singing languor that I had seen in Ganka’s movements. And this sweet torment, and the music, and my sadness and happiness made me cry, burying my face in a cushion.
It was a grey morning, and I was afraid it would rain and I wouldn’t be allowed out into the garden.
I was, indeed, not allowed out.
I sat down sadly at the piano and began playing exercises, stumbling each time in the same place.
But later in the morning the sun appeared and I raced out into the garden.
1
He is probably limping in imitation of Lord Byron. For more on Teffi’s brother(s), see “My First Visit to an Editorial Office”, note 1.
3
In her autobiographical sketch “Kishmish”, Teffi explains that a