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.

“Nice, isn’t it?” she cried.

“Very!” he replied, taking off his cap, and turned round towards her: “Be so kind as to drop this down beside you, or else I’ll knock it off into this here tub, which, forgive me, does after all leak, and is full of leeches.”

She put the cap on her knees.

“Oh, don’t worry, drop it down anywhere.”

She pressed the cap to her breast:

“No, I’m going to take care of it!”

Again his heart stirred tenderly, but again he turned away and began intensifying his thrusting of the oar into the water that shone between the sedge and the water lilies. Mosquitoes stuck to his face and hands, the warm silver of everything all around was dazzling: the sultry air, the undulating sunlight, the curly whiteness of the clouds shining softly in the sky and in the clear patches of water between islands of sedge and water lilies; it was so shallow everywhere that the lakebed with its underwater weeds was visible, but somehow that did not preclude that bottomless depth into which the reflected sky and clouds receded. Suddenly she shrieked again – and the boat toppled sideways: she had put her hand into the water from the stern and, catching a water-lily stalk, had jerked it towards her so hard that she had tipped over along with the boat – he was scarcely in time to leap up and catch her by the armpits. She began roaring with laughter and, falling onto her back in the stern, she splashed water right into his eyes with her wet hand. Then he grabbed her again and, without understanding what he was doing, kissed her laughing lips. She quickly clasped her arms around his neck and kissed him clumsily on the cheek…

From then on they began boating at night. The next day she called him out into the garden after dinner and asked:

“Do you love me?”

He replied ardently, remembering the kisses of the day before in the boat:

“Since the first day we met!”

“Me too,” she said. “No, at first I hated you – I didn’t think you noticed me at all. But all that’s already in the past, thank God! This evening, as soon as everyone goes to bed, go there again and wait for me. Only leave the house as cautiously as possible – Mama watches my every step, she’s madly jealous.”

In the night she came to the shore with a plaid on her arm. In joy he greeted her confusedly, only asking:

“And why the plaid?”

“How silly you are! We’ll be cold. Well, get in quickly and paddle to the other bank…”

They were silent all the way. When they floated up to the wood on the other side, she said:

“There we are. Now come here to me. Where’s the plaid? Ah, it’s underneath me. Cover me up, I’m cold, and sit down. That’s right… No, wait, yesterday we kissed awkwardly somehow, now I’ll kiss you myself to begin with, only gently, gently. And you put your arms around me… everywhere…”

She had only a petticoat on under the sarafan. Tenderly, scarcely touching, she kissed the edges of his lips. He, with his head in a spin^[74], threw her onto the stern. She embraced him frenziedly…

After lying for a while in exhaustion, she raised herself a little and, with a smile of happy tiredness and pain that had not yet abated, said:

“Now we’re husband and wife. Mama says she won’t survive my getting married, but I don’t want to think about that for the moment… You know, I want to bathe, I’m terribly fond of bathing at night…”

She pulled her clothes off over her head, the whole of her long body showed up white in the twilight, and she began tying a braid around her head, lifting her arms and showing her dark armpits and her raised breasts, unashamed of her nakedness and the little dark prominence below her belly. When she had finished, she quickly kissed him, leapt to her feet, fell flat into the water with her head tossed back and began thrashing noisily with her legs.

Afterwards, hurrying, he helped her to dress and wrap herself up in the plaid. In the twilight her black eyes and black hair, tied up in a braid, were fabulously visible. He did not dare touch her any more, he only kissed her hands and stayed silent out of unendurable happiness. All the time it seemed that there was someone there in the darkness of the wood on the shore, which glimmered in places with glow-worms, someone standing and listening. At times something would give out a cautious rustling there. She would raise her head:

“Hold on, what’s that?”

“Don’t be afraid, it’s probably a frog crawling out onto the bank. Or a hedgehog in the wood…”

“And what if it’s a wild goat?”

“What wild goat’s that?”

“I don’t know. But just think: some wild goat comes out of the wood, stands and looks… I feel so good, I feel like talking dreadful nonsense!”

And again he would press her hands to his lips, sometimes he would kiss her cold breast like something sacred. What a completely new creature she had become for him! And the greenish half-light hung beyond the blackness of the low wood and did not go out, it was weakly reflected in the flat whiteness of the water in the distance, and the dewy plants on the shore had a strong smell like celery, while mysteriously, pleadingly, the invisible mosquitoes whined and terrible, sleepless dragonflies flew, flew with a quiet crackling above the boat and further off, above that nocturnally shining water. And all the time, somewhere something was rustling, crawling, making its way along…

A week later, stunned by the horror of the utterly sudden parting, he was disgracefully, shamefully expelled from the house.

One day after dinner they were sitting in the drawing room with their heads touching, and looking at the pictures in old editions of The Cornfield^[75].

“You haven’t stopped loving me yet?” he asked quietly, pretending to be looking attentively.

“Silly. Terribly silly!” she whispered.

Suddenly, softly running footsteps could be heard – and on the threshold in a tattered black silk dressing gown and worn morocco slippers^[76] stood her crazy mother. Her black eyes were gleaming tragically. She ran in, as though onto a stage, and cried:

“I understand everything! I sensed it, I watched! Scoundrel, she shall not be yours!”

And throwing up her arm in its long sleeve, she fired a deafening shot from the ancient pistol with which Petya, loading it just with powder, scared the sparrows. In the smoke he rushed towards her, grabbed her tenacious arm. She broke free, struck him on the forehead with the pistol, cutting his brow open and drawing blood, flung it at him and, hearing people running through the house in response to the shouting and the shot, began crying out even more theatrically with foam on her blue-grey lips:

“Only over my dead body will she take the step to you! If she runs away with you, that same day I shall hang myself, throw myself from the roof! Scoundrel, out of my house! Maria Viktorovna, choose: your mother or him!”

She whispered:

“You, you, Mama…”

He came to, opened his eyes – still just as unwavering, enigmatic, funereal, the bluish-lilac peephole above the door looked at him from the black darkness, and still with the same unwavering, onward-straining speed, springing and rocking, the carriage tore on. That sad halt had already been left far, far behind. And all that there had been already fully twenty years ago – coppices, magpies, marshes, water lilies, grass snakes, cranes… Yes, there had been cranes as well, hadn’t there – how on earth had he forgotten about them! Everything had been strange in that amazing summer, strange too the pair of cranes of some sort which from time to time had flown in from somewhere to the shore of the marsh, and the fact that they had allowed just her alone near them and, arching their slender, long necks, with very stern but gracious curiosity, had looked at her from above when she, having run up to them softly and lightly in her multicoloured woollen shoes, had suddenly squatted down in front of them, spreading out her yellow sarafan on the moist and warm greenery of the shore, and peeped with childish fervour into their beautiful and menacing black pupils, tightly gripped by a ring of dark-grey iris. He had looked at her and at them from a distance through binoculars, and seen distinctly their small, shiny heads – even their bony nostrils, the slits of their strong, large beaks, which they used to kill grass snakes with a single blow. Their stumpy bodies with the fluffy bunches of their tails had been tightly covered with steel-grey plumage, the scaly canes of their legs disproportionately long and slender – those of one completely black, of the other greenish. Sometimes they had both stood on one leg for hours at a time in incomprehensible immobility, sometimes quite out of the blue^[77] they had jumped up and down, opening wide their enormous wings; or otherwise they had strolled about grandly, stepping out slowly, steadily, lifting their feet, squeezing their three talons into a little ball and putting them down flat, spreading the talons – like a predator’s – apart, and all the time nodding their little heads… Though when she was running up to them, he had no longer been thinking of anything or seeing anything – he had seen only her outspread sarafan, and shaken with morbid languor at the thought of, beneath it, her swarthy body and the dark moles upon it. And on that their final day, on that their final time sitting together on the couch in the drawing room, over the old volume of The Cornfield, she had held his cap in her hands as well, pressed it to her breast, like that time in the boat, and had said, flashing her joyful black-mirrored eyes into his:

“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.

27th September 1940