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.
28th September 1940
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.
All summer after that she went around the villages and hamlets with him, begging for alms. She wore out her clothes, grew shabby, was baked in the wind and sun, became nothing but skin and bone, but was tireless. She walked bare-footed, with a sackcloth bag over her shoulder, propping herself up with a tall stick, and in the villages and hamlets bowed silently before every hut. The boy walked behind her with a bag over his little shoulder too, wearing her old shoes, battered and hardened like the down-at-heel things that lie about somewhere in a gully.
He was ugly. The crown of his head was large, flat and covered with the red hair of a boar, his little nose was squashed flat and had wide nostrils, his eyes were nut brown and very shiny. But when he smiled he was very sweet.
28th September 1940
In June, a student set off from his mother’s estate for his uncle and aunt’s – he needed to pay them a visit, find out how they were, about the health of his uncle, a general who had lost the use of his legs. The student performed this service every summer and was travelling now with submissive serenity, unhurriedly reading a new book by Averchenko[85] in a second-class carriage, with a young, rounded thigh set on the edge of the couch, absent-mindedly watching through the window as the telegraph poles dipped and rose with their white porcelain cups in the shape of lilies-of-the-valley. He looked like a young officer – only his white peaked cap with a blue band was a student’s, everything else was to the military model: a white tunic, greenish breeches, boots with patent-leather tops, a cigarette case with an orange lighting wick.
His uncle and aunt were rich. When he came home from Moscow, a heavy tarantass was sent out to the station for him, a pair of draught horses and not a coachman but a workman. But at his uncle’s station he always stepped for a certain time into a completely different life, into the pleasure of great prosperity, he began feeling handsome, jaunty, affected. So it was now too. With involuntary foppishness he got into a light carriage on rubber wheels with three lively dark-bay horses in harness, driven by a young coachman in a blue, sleeveless poddyovka and a yellow silk shirt.
A quarter of an hour later, with a sprinkling of little bells softly playing and its tyres hissing across the sand around the flower bed, the troika flew into the round yard of an extensive country estate towards the perron of a spacious new house of two storeys. Onto the perron to take his things emerged a strapping servant wearing half-whiskers, a red-and-black striped waistcoat and gaiters. The student took an agile and improbably big leap out of the carriage: smiling and rocking as she walked, on the threshold of the vestibule there appeared his aunt – a loose, shapeless, tussore day coat[86] on a big, flaccid body, a large, drooping face, a nose like an anchor and yellow bags beneath brown eyes. She kissed him on the cheeks in a familiar way, with feigned joy he pressed his lips against her soft, dark hand, quickly thinking: lying like this for three whole days, and not knowing what to do with myself in my free time! Feignedly and hurriedly replying to her feignedly solicitous questions about his mother, he followed her into the large vestibule, glanced with cheerful hatred at the somewhat bent, stuffed brown bear with gleaming glass eyes standing clumsily at full height by the entrance to the wide staircase to the upper floor and obligingly holding a bronze dish for calling cards[87] in its sharp-clawed front paws, and suddenly even came to a halt in gratifying surprise: the wheelchair with the plump, pale, blue-eyed General, was being wheeled steadily towards him by a tall, stately beauty with big grey eyes in a grey gingham dress[88], a white pinafore and a white headscarf, all aglow with youth, strength, cleanliness, the lustre of her well-groomed hands and the matt whiteness of her face. Kissing his uncle’s hand, he managed to glance at the extraordinary elegance of her dress and feet. The General joked:
“And this is my Antigone, my good guide, although I’m not even blind, like Oedipus[89] was, and especially not to good-looking women. Make one another’s acquaintance, youngsters.”
She smiled faintly and replied with only a bow to the bow of the student.
The strapping servant with the half-whiskers and the red waistcoat led him past the bear and up the staircase with its gleaming dark-yellow wood and a red runner down the middle and along a similar corridor, took him into a large bedroom with a marble bathroom alongside – on this occasion a different one to before, and with windows looking onto the park, and not into the yard. But he walked without seeing anything. Spinning around in his head there was still the cheerful nonsense with which he had driven onto the estate – “my uncle, the most honest fellow”[90] – but already there was something else too: there’s a woman for you!
Humming, he began to shave, wash and get changed, and he put on trousers with straps under the feet, thinking:
“Such women really do exist! And what would you give for the love of such a woman! And how with such beauty can you possibly be pushing old men and women around in wheelchairs!”
And absurd ideas came into his head: to go on and stay here for a month, for two, to enter in secret from everyone into friendship with her, intimacy, to arouse her love, then say: be my wife, I’m all yours and for ever. Mama, Aunt, Uncle, their amazement when I declare to them our love and our decision to unite our lives, their indignation, then persuasion, cries, tears, curses, disinheritance – it all means nothing to me for your sake…
Running down the stairs to his aunt and uncle – their rooms were downstairs – he thought:
“What rubbish does enter my head, though! It stands to reason[91], you can stay here on some pretext or other… you can start unobtrusively paying court[92], pretend to be madly in love… But will you achieve anything? And even if you do, what next? How do you finish the story off? Really get married, do you?”
For about an hour he sat with his aunt and uncle in the latter’s huge study, with a huge writing desk, with a huge ottoman, covered with fabrics from Turkestan, with a rug on the wall above with crossed oriental weapons hanging all over it, with inlaid tables for smoking, and with a large photographic portrait in a rosewood frame under a little gold crown on the mantelpiece, on which was the free flourish, made with his own hand: Alexander[93].
“How glad I am, Uncle and Aunt, to be with you again,” he said towards the end, thinking of the nurse. “And how wonderful it is here at your place! It’ll be a dreadful shame to leave.”
“And who is it driving you out?” replied his uncle. “Where are you hurrying off to? Stay on till you’re sick of it.”
“It goes without saying[94]
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