Tanya

She was in service as a housemaid to a relative of his, Kazakova, a minor landowner; she was in her eighteenth year and was of no great height, which was particularly noticeable when, gently waggling her skirt and with her small breasts lifted slightly beneath her blouse, she went about bare-footed or, in winter, in felt boots; her simple little face was only pleasant-looking, while her grey, peasant’s eyes were beautiful only by virtue of youth. At that distant time he expended himself particularly recklessly, led a nomadic life, had many chance amorous encounters and liaisons – and regarded the liaison with her as a chance one too…

* * *

She quickly became reconciled to the fateful, amazing thing that had somehow suddenly happened to her that autumn night; she cried for a few days, but with every day became more and more convinced that it was not a misfortune that had occurred, but good fortune, that he was becoming ever sweeter and dearer to her; at moments of intimacy, which soon began to be repeated more and more often, she already called him Petrusha and spoke of that night as of their shared, cherished past.

At first he both did and did not believe it:

“Is it really true you weren’t pretending to be asleep then?”

Yet she only opened her eyes wide:

“But didn’t you sense I was asleep, do you really not know how lads and lasses sleep?”

“If I’d known you were really asleep, I wouldn’t have touched you for anything.”

“Well, I didn’t feel a thing, not a thing, almost till the very last minute! Only why did you take it into your head to come to me? You arrived here and didn’t even give me a glance, it was only in the evening you asked: you must have been taken on recently, you’re called Tanya, I think? And then what a long time you looked as if you were paying no attention. So were you pretending?”

He replied that of course he was pretending, but he was telling a lie: everything had turned out quite unexpectedly for him too.

He had spent the beginning of the autumn in the Crimea, and on the way to Moscow had dropped in on Kazakova, had lived for a couple of weeks in the soothing simplicity of her estate and the meagre days of the start of November, and had been on the point of leaving. That day, in farewell to the countryside, with a rifle over his shoulders and a hound, he went riding from morning till evening through empty fields and bare copses, found nothing, and returned to the estate tired and hungry, ate a pan of rissoles with sour cream at dinner, drank a carafe of vodka and several glasses of tea while Kazakova, as always, talked about her late husband and her two sons who worked in Oryol. At about ten o’clock the house, as always, was already dark, only one candle was burning in the study beyond the drawing room where he stayed whenever he came. As he went into the study, she was kneeling on his bedclothes on the ottoman with a candle in her hand, passing the burning candle over the log-built wall. On seeing him, she thrust the candle onto the nightstand and, jumping down, darted off.

“What’s this?” he said in bewilderment. “Hang on, what were you doing here?”

“Burning a bedbug,” she replied in a rapid whisper. “I started straightening the bedclothes for you, I look, and there’s a bedbug on the wall…”

And she ran away laughing.

His eyes followed her, and without undressing, taking off only his boots, he lay down on the quilt on the ottoman, hoping still to have a smoke and a think about something – it was not his custom to go to sleep at ten o’clock – and immediately dropped off. He came to for a moment, worried through his sleep by the flickering flame of the candle, blew on it and dropped off again. And when he opened his eyes again, there outside the two windows into the yard and the light-filled side window into the garden was the autumnal moonlit night, empty and solitarily beautiful. He found his slippers in the gloom beside the ottoman and went into the hallway next to the study to go out onto the back porch – they had forgotten to leave him what he needed for the night. But the door out of the hallway proved to be padlocked from the outside, and he set off through the house, mysteriously lit from the yard, for the front porch. That way out was through the main hallway and a large, log-built lobby. In this hallway, opposite a tall window above an old locker was a partition wall, and behind it a room without windows where the housemaids always lived. The door in the partition wall was ajar, and it was dark beyond it. He lit a match and saw her sleeping. She was lying on her back on a wooden bed wearing just a nightshirt and a little fustian skirt – her small breasts were round under the nightshirt, her naked legs were bared to the knees, her right arm, thrown out towards the wall, and the face on the pillow seemed dead… The match went out. He stood for a while – then cautiously went towards the bed…

* * *

Going out through the dark lobby onto the porch, he thought feverishly:

“How strange, how unexpected! And surely she wasn’t really asleep?”

He stood for a while on the porch, set off across the yard… And the night was a strange one somehow. The wide, empty yard, brightly lit by the high moon. Opposite, sheds, roofed with old, petrified straw – the cattle yard, the coach house, the stables. Behind their roofs, on the northern horizon, mysterious nocturnal clouds are slowly dispersing – dead mountains of snow. Overhead there are only light, white ones, and in them the high moon shedding tears like diamonds, continually emerging into patches of clear, dark blue, into the starry depths of the sky, and seeming to illumine the roofs and the yard still more brightly. And everything around is strange somehow in its nocturnal existence, disengaged from everything human, aimlessly radiant. And it is strange too, because it is as though he is seeing this whole nocturnal, moonlit, autumnal world for the first time…

He sat down beside the coach house on the footboard of the tarantass, bespattered with dried mud. There was an autumnal warmth, the smell of the autumnal garden, the night was majestic, impassive and benign, and it was uniting in a surprising way somehow with the feelings he had brought away from that unexpected union with a female creature still half a child…

She had begun sobbing quietly on coming to her senses, as if realizing only at that moment what had happened. Yet perhaps not as if, but actually? Her whole body had yielded to him as though lifeless. First he had tried to wake her in a whisper: “Listen, don’t be afraid…” She had not heard, or had pretended not to. He had cautiously kissed her hot cheek – she had not responded to the kiss at all, and he had thought she had silently given him her consent to all that might follow this. He had parted her legs, their delicate, ardent warmth – she had only sighed in her sleep, stretched weakly and thrown an arm up behind her head…

“And if there was no pretence?” he thought, getting up from the footboard and gazing at the night in agitation.

When she had begun sobbing, sweetly and mournfully, he had, with a feeling not only of animal gratitude for the unexpected happiness she had unconsciously granted him, but also of rapture, of love, started kissing her neck, her breast, all of which smelt ravishingly of something rural, maidenly. And she, while sobbing, had suddenly responded to him with an unconscious female impulse – tightly, and also as though gratefully, she had embraced him and pressed his head against her. Who he was, she, half-asleep, did not yet understand, but all the same – he was the one with whom, at a certain set point, she had been intended to unite for the first time in the most mysterious and blissfully mortal intimacy. That mutual intimacy had taken place and could not now be undone by anything in the world, and he had taken it away inside him for ever, and now this extraordinary night was accepting him into its inscrutable bright realm together with it, that intimacy.

How could he leave and then remember her only by chance, forget her dear, simple-hearted little voice, her now joyful, now sorrowful, but always loving, devoted eyes, how could he love others and attach to some of them much greater significance than to her!

* * *

She served at table the next day without raising her eyes. Kazakova asked:

“Why are you like this, Tanya?”

She replied submissively:

“I’ve got more than enough to grieve me, ma’am…”

When she had left the room, Kazakova said to him:

“Yes, of course, an orphan, no mother, her father a destitute, dissolute peasant…”

Just before evening, as she was setting up the samovar on the porch, he said to her when passing by:

“Don’t you go thinking anything, I fell in love with you a long time ago. Give up crying and grieving, that won’t help a thing…”

She replied quietly, shoving flaming kindling into the samovar:

“If you’d really fallen in love with me, it’d all be easier…”

Then she started glancing at him occasionally, as if timidly asking with her gaze: really?

One evening, when she went in to straighten his bed, he went up to her and put his arm round her shoulder. She glanced at him in fright and, blushing all over, whispered:

“Go away, for God’s sake. The old woman might well come in…”

“What old woman?”

“The old housemaid, as if you don’t know!”

“I’ll come to you tonight…”

It was as if she had been scorched – to begin with, the old woman horrified her:

“Oh, what are you thinking of, what are you thinking of! I’ll go mad with terror!”

“No, it’s all right, don’t be afraid – I won’t come,” he said hurriedly.

Now she was already working as before, quickly and solicitously, again she began rushing across the yard to the kitchen like a whirlwind, as she had rushed previously, and at times, seizing a convenient moment, she would surreptitiously throw at him glances that were already embarrassed and joyful. And then one day, in the morning, first thing, when he was still asleep, she was sent to town for some shopping. At dinner Kazakova said:

“What’s to be done, I’ve sent the starosta and the workman off to the mill, there’s no one to send to the station for Tanya. Maybe you’d go?”

Containing his joy, he answered with feigned carelessness:

“Why, I’ll willingly go for a drive.”

The old housemaid, who was serving the food, frowned.

“Why do you want to put the girl to shame for good, ma’am? What’ll they start saying about her all over the village after this?”

“You go yourself, then,” said Kazakova. “What, she’s to come on foot from the station, is she?”

Around four, he rode out in the charabanc with the old, tall, black mare and, afraid of being late for the train, he drove her on hard beyond the village, bouncing along the greasy, hummocky road that had frozen a little and then turned damp – recent days had been wet, misty, and that day the mist was especially dense: even when he was driving through the village it had seemed that night was coming on, and in the huts smoky-red lights had already been visible, weird somehow beyond the blue-grey of the mist. Further on, amidst the fields, the darkness had become almost complete and already impenetrable because of the mist. There was a cold wind and damp gloom coming towards him. But the wind was not dispersing the mist, on the contrary, it was driving its cold, dark blue-grey smoke even more densely together, suffocating him with it, with its odorous dampness, and it seemed that beyond its impenetrability there was nothing – the end of the world and everything living. His peaked cap, knee-length jacket, eyelashes, moustache, everything was covered in the tiniest wet beads. The black mare hurtled onwards with a flourish, the charabanc, bouncing over the slippery hummocks, was hitting him in the chest. He grew adroit enough to light up – the sweet, fragrant, warm, human smoke of the cigarette merged with the primeval smell of the mist, the late autumn, the wet, bare fields. And everything was growing dark, everything was growing gloomy all around, above and below – the long neck of the horse, indistinctly dark, and its pricked ears had become almost invisible. And growing ever stronger was a feeling of closeness to the horse – the only living creature in this wilderness, in the deathly hostility of all that was to the right and to the left, ahead and behind, of all the unknown things that were so ominously hidden in this smoky dark, that flew upon him ever denser and blacker…

When he drove into the village by the station, he was gripped by the joy of habitation, the pitiful lights in the wretched little windows, their gentle comfort, and, at the station, everything about the place seemed another world completely, lively, cheerful, urban. And he had not had time to tether the horse, before the train with its light windows began flashing with a roar towards the station, covering everything with the sulphurous smell of coal. He ran into the station, feeling as though he were waiting for his young wife, and he immediately saw her, dressed for the town, come in through the doors opposite, following the station watchman, who was lugging two bags of shopping: the station building was dirty, it stank of the paraffin in the lamps that dimly lit it, but she was all radiant with excited eyes, with the youth of her face, stirred by the unusual journey, and the watchman was saying something to her politely. And suddenly her gaze met his and she even came to a halt in her perplexity: what’s the matter, why is he here?

“Tanya,” he said hurriedly, “hello, I’ve come for you, there was no one else to send…”

Had she ever had such a happy evening in her life? He came for me himself, and I’ve come from town, I’m dressed up and so pretty; he couldn’t even have imagined it, always seeing me only in an old skirt and a poor cotton blouse; my face is like a milliner’s under this white silk headscarf, I’m wearing a new, brown worsted dress under a thick cloth jacket, I’ve got white cotton stockings on and new calf-length boots with brass heels! All atremble inside, she began speaking to him in the sort of tone people use when out visiting and, lifting her hem a little, she set off after him with ladylike little steps, condescendingly marvelling: “Oh Lord, how slippery it is here, what dirty footprints the peasants have left!” Turning all cold with joyful terror, she lifted her dress high above her white calico underskirt so as to sit down on the skirt, not on the dress, and she got into the charabanc and sat down next to him as though she were his equal, drawing herself up awkwardly away from the bags at her feet.

In silence he set the horse moving and drove it into the icy dark of the night and the mist, past little lights, glimpsed here and there low down in huts, over the potholes of this torturous rural road in November, and she did not dare utter a word, horrified at his silence: was he, maybe, angry about something? He understood this and was deliberately silent. And suddenly, having driven out beyond the village and plunged now into total gloom, he brought the horse to a walk, took the reins into his left hand, and with his right gave her shoulders in the jacket, sprinkled with cold wet beads, a squeeze, mumbling and laughing:

“Tanya, Tanyechka…”

And she threw her whole body at him, pressed her silk headscarf, her gentle, glowing face, her eyelashes filled with hot tears up against his cheek. He found her lips, wet with the joyful tears, and, stopping the horse, for a long time could not tear himself away from them. Then, like a blind man, unable to see a thing in the mist and the gloom, he got out of the charabanc, threw his coat onto the ground and drew her towards him by the sleeve. Understanding everything at once, she immediately jumped down to him and, lifting her entire cherished costume, the new dress and the skirt, she groped her way down with quick solicitude onto the coat, giving up to him for ever not only the whole of her body, already his absolute property now, but the whole of her soul as well.

* * *

Again he put off his departure.

She knew it was for her sake; she saw how affectionate he was with her, how he already spoke as with an intimate, his secret friend in the house, and she stopped being afraid and quivering whenever he approached her, as she had quivered to begin with. He became calmer and more natural at moments of love – she quickly adjusted to him. She changed completely with the speed of which youth is capable, she became equable, carelessly happy, already called him Petrusha easily, and sometimes even pretended he was bothering her with his kisses: “Oh Lord, I just can’t get rid of you! The moment he sees me alone – he’s at me straight away!” – and this afforded her particular joy: that means he loves me, that means he’s completely mine, if I can talk to him like that! And there was another happiness – expressing to him her jealousy, her right to him:

“Thank God there’s no work at the barn, otherwise there’d be young girls about, and I’d show you for hanging around them!” she would say.

And, suddenly getting embarrassed, would add with a touching attempt at a smile:

“Aren’t I enough for you on my own, then?”

Winter set in early. After the mists came a frosty north wind, it froze hard the greasy hummocks of the roads, turned the earth to stone, burned the last of the grass in the garden and the yard. Leaden white clouds started to appear, the noise of the totally denuded garden was restless and hasty, as though it were running away somewhere, and at night the white moon was forever diving into puffy storm clouds. The estate and the village seemed hopelessly poor and rough. Then light snow began to fall, whitening the frozen mud as if with castor sugar, and the estate and the fields that could be seen from it became grayish white and expansive. In the village the final work was being completed – potatoes were being sorted over and tipped down into cellars for the winter, with the rotten ones being thrown aside. Once he went to take a walk through the village, donning a poddyovka with a fox-fur lining and pulling on a fur hat. The north wind blew his moustache about and stung his cheeks. Above everything hung the sullen sky, the greyish-white, sloping field beyond the little river seemed very close. In the village, on the earth beside the thresholds of the huts lay pieces of sacking with piles of potatoes. Sitting working on the sacking were married women and young girls, bundled up in hempen shawls, in men’s torn jackets, battered felt boots, and with their faces and hands turned blue – he thought with horror: and under their skirt hems their legs are completely bare!

When he got home, she was standing in the hallway, wiping the boiling samovar with a cloth so as to carry it to the table, and she said at once in a low voice:

“I expect you’ve been to the village, the girls are sorting over the potatoes there… Well, you walk around, walk around, and try and find yourself the nicest one!”

And holding back her tears, she slipped out into the lobby.

Towards evening the snow fell thick as could be and, running past him through the reception hall, she glanced at him with irrepressible childish merriment and whispered teasingly:

“So, be doing a lot of walking now, will you? And this is only the start – the dogs are rolling around all over the yard – it’s going to blow such a blizzard, you won’t even poke your nose out of the house!”

“Lord,” he thought, “how will I ever pluck up the courage to tell her I’m on the point of leaving!”

And he felt a passionate desire to be in Moscow as soon as possible. The frost, a snowstorm, on the square, opposite Iverskaya, pairs of grey horses with little jingling bells, on Tverskaya the electric light of the lamps up high in the swirling snow… In the Moscow Grand the chandeliers are sparkling, string music is spilling out, and now, throwing his snow-covered fur coat into the arms of the doormen, wiping his moustache, wet from the snow, with a handkerchief, he goes cheerfully, in his customary way, down the red carpet into the heated, crowded hall, into the sound of voices, into the smell of food and cigarettes, into the fussing of footmen and the all-embracing waves of strings, now dissolutely languorous, now stormily rollicking…

For the whole of dinner he could not raise his eyes to her carefree bustling, to her calmed face.

Late in the evening he put on felt boots, an old raccoon coat of the late Kazakov’s, pulled on a hat and went out through the back porch into the blizzard – to get a breath of air, to take a look at it. But an entire snowdrift had already piled up under the roof of the porch, he stumbled in it and gathered up whole sleeves full of snow, further on it was pure hell, a rushing white fury. Wading with difficulty, he went around the house, reached the front porch and, stamping, shaking himself down, ran into the dark lobby, which was howling in the storm, then into the warm hallway, where a candle was burning on the locker. She leapt out bare-footed from behind the partition in that same little fustian skirt, and clasped her hands together:

“Lord! Where on earth have you been!”

He threw his fur coat and hat off onto the locker, sprinkling it with snow, and in a mad rapture of tenderness he grabbed her up in his arms. In that same rapture she tore herself free, grabbed a besom and began beating at his boots, which were white with snow, and pulling them from his feet.

“Lord, and masses of snow there too! You’ll catch your death of cold!”

* * *

At times in the night, through his sleep, he would hear the monotonous noise of monotonous pressure on the house, then there would be a stormy swoop, sprinkling snow with a rattle against the shutters, shaking them – and then dying down, moving away with a soporific drone… The night seemed endless and sweet – the warmth of the bed, the warmth of the old house, alone in the white darkness of the streaming sea of snow…

In the morning he thought it was the wind of the night that was throwing the shutters wide open with a bang, hitting them against the walls – he opened his eyes – no, it was already light, and looking in from everywhere through the snow-caked windows was white, white whiteness, piled up to the very window ledges, and on the ceiling lay its white reflection. The storm was still droning and blowing, but quietly, already in the manner of the daytime. Visible opposite him from the head of the ottoman were two windows with double, time-blackened frames and a pattern of small panes, the third, to the left of the bedhead, was whitest and lightest of all. On the ceiling is this white reflection, and in the corner, trembling, howling and occasionally banging, is the door of the stove, drawn in by the fire flaring up – how nice, he had been asleep, had heard nothing, while Tanya, Tanyechka, faithful and beloved, had opened up the shutters, then come in quietly in felt boots, all cold, with snow on her shoulders and head, which she had bundled up in a hempen headscarf, and, kneeling down, had got it going. And he had not had time to think about it before in she came, carrying a tray with tea, already without the headscarf. As she put the tray onto the little table by the bedhead, with a scarcely perceptible smile she glanced into his eyes, which had a morning-time clarity and an air of surprise, coming straight from sleep:

“How is it you’ve slept so late?”

“What’s the time then?”

She looked at the watch on the table and did not answer at once – even now she couldn’t make out what the time was straight away:

“Ten… Ten minutes to nine…”

Glancing at the door, he pulled her towards him by the skirt. She declined, pushing his hand away:

“It’s quite impossible, everyone’s awake…”

“Oh, for one minute!”

“The old woman’ll come in…”

“No one’ll come in – for one minute!”

“Oh, the trouble you cause me!”

Quickly taking her woollen-stockinged legs, one after the other, out of the felt boots, she lay down, looking round at the door… Ah, that peasant smell of her head, her breath, the apple cold of her cheek! He began whispering angrily:

“Again you’re kissing with your lips pressed together! When will I break you of it?”

“I’m not a young lady… Wait, I’ll lie down a bit lower… Well, be quick, I’m scared to death.”

And they stared one another in the eye – intently and senselessly, waiting.

“Petrusha…”

“Be quiet. Why do you always talk at these times?”

“But when am I then to have a talk with you, if not at these times? I won’t press my lips together any more… Swear that you’ve got no one in Moscow…”

“Don’t squeeze my neck like that.”

“No one in your life will love you like this. Now, you fell in love with me, and it was as if I fell in love with myself too, I just dote on myself… But if you abandon me…”

Slipping out with a hot face under the roof of the back porch into the blizzard, she stood there, squatted down for an instant, then hurled herself into the swirls of white to reach the front porch, sinking in deeper than her bare knees.

The hallway smelt of the samovar. The old housemaid, sitting on the locker under the tall, snow-covered window, was supping from a saucer and, without tearing herself away from it, gave her a dirty look:

“Where’ve you been? You’re all covered in snow.”

“I was taking Pyotr Nikolayevich his tea.”

“Taking it to him in the servants’ room, were you? We know all about your tea.”

“If you know, then good luck to you. Is the mistress up?”

“She’s remembered! Up before you were.”

“You’re always in a temper!”

And with a happy sigh, she went behind the partition to get her cup, and there she started singing, barely audibly:

 

When I go into the garden,

Into the garden green,

Into the garden green to walk,

My own true love to see…

 

* * *

In the afternoon, sitting in the study with a book, listening to ever the same noise, first lessening, then menacingly growing around the house, which was sinking more and more into snow in the midst of the milky whiteness sweeping in from all directions, he thought: when it dies down, I’ll leave.

In the evening he found a moment to tell her to come to him later on in the night, when the house was most sound asleep – for the whole night, until morning. She shook her head, had a think and said: all right. It was really frightening, but all the sweeter.

He felt the same as well. And he was stirred too by pity for her: she didn’t even know it was their last night!

In the night he would now fall asleep, now wake up in alarm: would she dare to come? The darkness of the house, the noise around the darkness, the shutters shaking, the constant howling in the stove… Suddenly he came to in terror: he had not heard – it was impossible to hear her, given that criminal caution with which she made her way through the house in the dense darkness – he had not heard, but had sensed that, invisible, she was already standing by the ottoman. He reached out his arms. She silently dived under the blanket to him. He could hear her heart beating, feel her frozen bare feet, and he whispered the most ardent words he could possibly find and utter.

They lay like that for a long time, chest to chest, kissing with such force that it hurt their teeth. She remembered he had bid her not to press her mouth shut and, trying to please, she opened it wide like a baby jackdaw:

“You’ve probably not slept at all?”

She answered in a joyful whisper:

“Not a minute. I was waiting all the time…”

After groping on the table for matches, he lit a candle. She gasped in terror:

“Petrusha, what have you done? Now if the old woman wakes up and sees the light…”

“To hell with her,” he said, gazing at her flushed little face. “To hell with her, I want to see you…”

He held her and did not take his eyes off her. She whispered:

“I’m scared – why are you looking at me like that?”

“Because there’s no one on earth prettier than you. This head, with this little braid around it, like a young Venus…”

Her eyes shone with laughter, with happiness:

“Who’s this Vinus?”

“There used to be this… And this little nightshirt…”

“Well, you buy me a calico one… You really must love me a lot!”

“I don’t love you a bit. And again you smell – is it of quails, or is it dry hemp?…”

“Why is it you like that? And you were saying I always talk at these times… but now… you’re talking yourself…”

She began pressing him tighter and tighter against her, she wanted to say something else but was no longer able to…

Afterwards he put out the light and lay for a long time in silence, smoking and thinking: but I do have to tell her anyway, it’s terrible, but I have to. And he began, barely audibly:

“Tanyechka…”

“What?” she asked, just as mysteriously.

“I have to leave, you know…”

She even sat up:

“When?”

“Soon, I’m afraid… very soon… I’ve got pressing business…”

She fell onto the pillow:

“O Lord!”

His business of some sort, somewhere there, in some Moscow or other, inspired in her something akin to awe. But how could she part with him, after all, for the sake of this business? And she fell silent, quickly and helplessly racking her brains for a way out of this insoluble horror. There was no way out. She wanted to cry: “Take me with you!” But she did not dare – was that really possible?

“I can’t stay here for ever…”

She listened and agreed: no, no…

“I can’t take you with me…”

Suddenly, in despair, she uttered:

“Why not?”

He thought quickly: “Yes, why not, why not?” And hastily replied:

“I have no home, Tanya, all my life I’ve been travelling from place to place… In Moscow I live in rented rooms… And I’m never getting married to anyone…”

“Why not?”

“Because I was just born that way.”

“And you’re never getting married to anyone?”

“Not to anyone, ever! And I give you my word of honour, honest to God, it’s essential for me, very important and pressing business. I’ll come back without fail for Christmas!”

She pressed her head against him, she lay for a while, dripping warm tears onto his hands, and whispered:

“Well, I’ll be going… It’ll soon start getting light…”

And she got up and began making the sign of the cross over him in the darkness:

“May the Queen of Heaven preserve you, may the Mother of God preserve you!”

Running into her room behind the partition, she sat down on the bed and, pressing her hands to her breast and licking the tears from her lips, to the accompaniment of the humming of the snowstorm in the lobby, she began whispering:

“Lord and Father! Queen of Heaven! O Lord, let it not abate, if only for a day or two more!”

* * *

Two days later he left – the abating swirls of snow were still rushing through the yard, but he could not protract her secret torment and his own any more, and he did not give in to Kazakova’s attempts to persuade him to wait at least until the following day.

Both the house and the estate as a whole became empty, died. And of imagining Moscow and him in it, his life there, his business of some sort, there was no possibility whatsoever.

* * *

He did not come for Christmas. What days they were! In what a torment of unresolved expectation, in what pitiful pretence to herself, as if there were no expectation at all, did the time pass from morning till evening! And for the whole of Christmas-tide she went about in her very best clothes – the same dress and the same calf-length boots she had worn when he met her then, in the autumn, at the station, on that unforgettable evening.

At Epiphany she believed avidly for some reason that at any moment from down the hill there would appear a peasant’s sledge, which he would have hired at the station, not having posted a letter for horses to be sent out for him, and she did not get up off the locker in the hallway for the whole day, gazing into the yard until her eyes hurt. The house was empty – Kazakova had gone off to visit neighbours, the old woman had had dinner in the servants’ room and sat there after dinner too, enjoying some spiteful talk with the cook. And she did not even go and have dinner, saying she had a stomach ache…

But then the evening started drawing in. She glanced once more at the empty yard with its glittering crust of ice on the snow and got up, saying to herself firmly: that’s it, I don’t need anyone any more, and I don’t want to wait for anything! – and, dressed up, she set off at a stroll through the reception hall, through the drawing room, in the light of the wintry, yellow sunset from the windows, and began singing loudly and carelessly – with the relief of a life that was settled:

 

When I go into the garden,

Into the garden green,

Into the garden green to walk,

My own true love to see…

 

And just at the words about her true love she entered the study, saw his empty ottoman, the empty armchair beside the writing desk, where he had once sat with a book in his hands, and she fell into the armchair with her head on the desk, sobbing and crying: “Queen of Heaven, send me death!”

* * *

He came in February – when she had already completely buried inside her any hope of seeing him even once more in her life.

And it was as if all there had been before returned.

He was staggered when he saw her – she had grown so thin and become all faded, so timid and sad were her eyes. She too was staggered for the first moment: he seemed to her to be different somehow too, older, a stranger, and even unpleasant – his moustache seemed to have got bigger, his voice rougher, his laughter and conversation while he was taking his things off in the hallway were excessively loud and unnatural, she felt awkward about looking him in the eye… But each tried to conceal all this from the other, and soon everything carried on, seemingly the way it had been before.

Then a terrible time began to approach again – the time of his new departure. He swore to her on an icon that he would come for Holy Week, and then that would be for the whole summer. She believed him, but she thought: “And what will happen in the summer? Again the same as now?” This now was no longer enough for her – she needed either completely, completely what had been before, and not a repetition, or else an inseparable life with him, without partings, without new agonies, without the shame of vain expectations. But she tried to drive this thought from her, tried to imagine all the happiness of the summer, when there would be so much freedom for them everywhere… – in the night and in the day, in the garden, in the fields, in the barn, and he would be beside her for a long, long time…

* * *

On the eve of his new departure it was a night already on the verge of spring, light and windy. Behind the house the garden was agitated, and constantly audible from it, carried by the wind, was the angry, helpless, abrupt barking of the dogs over the pit amidst the fir trees: imprisoned there was a vixen which had been caught in a trap and brought to the mistress’s yard by Kazakova’s forester.

He lay on his back on the ottoman with his eyes shut. She was next to him, on her side with the palm of her hand beneath her sad little head. Both were silent. Finally she whispered:

“Petrusha, are you asleep?”

He opened his eyes and looked into the light dusk of the room, illumined from the left by the golden light from the side window:

“No. What is it?”

“You don’t love me any more, you know, you ruined me for nothing,” she said calmly.

“Why ever for nothing? Don’t be silly.”

“You’ll be to blame. Where will I go now?”

“And why do you have to go anywhere?”

“Here you are again, again leaving for that Moscow of yours, and what on earth am I going to do here by myself?”

“Why, just the same as you did before. And then – I told you for sure, didn’t I? – in Holy Week I’ll come back for the whole summer.”

“Yes, maybe you will come too… Only you didn’t say such things to me before: ‘And why do you have to go anywhere?’ You used to really love me, said you’d not seen anyone prettier than me. And was I like this then?”

No, you weren’t, he thought. She had changed dreadfully. Even her body had become feebler somehow, all her bones could be felt.

“My time’s past,” she said. “I used to slip in to you – and I’d be both scared to death and pleased – well, the old woman’s gone to sleep, thank Heaven. But I’m not even scared of her now…”

He shrugged his shoulders:

“I don’t understand you. Give me the cigarettes from the table…”

She handed them to him. He lit up:

“I don’t understand what’s wrong with you. You’re simply unwell.”

“And I suppose that’s why I’ve stopped being dear to you. And what illness have I got?”

“You don’t understand me. I’m saying you’re unwell mentally. Because just think, please: what is it that’s happened, where have you got the idea that I don’t love you any more? And why do you keep repeating one and the same thing: used to, used to…”

She did not reply. The window was shining, there was the noise of the garden, the abrupt barking could be heard, angry, hopeless, plaintive… She slipped gently off the ottoman and, pressing her sleeve to her eyes, with her head jerking, she went softly in her woollen stockings towards the doors into the drawing room. He called her quietly and sternly:

“Tanya.”

She turned and answered barely audibly:

“What do you want?”

“Come here to me.”

“Why?”

“Come, I say.”

She went up to him obediently with her head bent down so he would not see that the whole of her face was covered in tears.

“Well, what do you want?”

“Sit down and don’t cry. Give me a kiss – well?”

He sat up, and she sat down next to him and embraced him, sobbing quietly. “My God, what ever am I to do?” he thought in despair. “Again these warm childish tears on a child’s hot face… She doesn’t even suspect all the strength of my love for her! But what can I do? Take her away with me? Where? To what sort of life? And what will come of it? Tying myself down, ruining myself for ever?” And he began whispering quickly, feeling his own tears too tickling his nose and lips.

“Tanyechka, my joy, don’t cry, listen: I’ll come in the spring for the whole summer, and you and I really will go ‘into the garden green’ – I’ve heard that little song of yours and I’ll never forget it – we’ll drive into the forest in the charabanc – remember how we drove in the charabanc from the station?”

“No one will let me go with you, darling!” she whispered bitterly, shaking her head on his chest, using this endearment for the first time. “And you won’t drive anywhere with me…”

But in her voice he could already hear timid joy, hope.

“I will, I will, Tanyechka! And don’t you dare speak to me like a servant again. And don’t you dare cry…”

He put his arm under her woollen-stockinged legs and sat her down, ever so light, on his knees:

“Well, say: ‘Petrusha, I love you very much!’”

She repeated it dully, hiccupping from her tears:

“I love you very much…”

This was in February of the terrible year of 1917. He was in the countryside then for the last time in his life.

22nd October 1940