Natalie

1

That summer I donned the peaked cap of a student for the first time and was happy, happy with the special happiness of the start of a young, free life which only comes at that period. I had grown up in a strict noble family in the country, and as a youth I dreamt fervently of love, was still pure in soul and body, blushed at the unrestrained conversations of my grammar-school comrades, and they would frown: “You should become a monk, Meschersky!” That summer I would no longer have blushed. Arriving home for the holidays, I decided that the time had come for me too to be like everyone else, to violate my purity, to seek love without romance and, on the strength of that decision and also a desire to show my blue cap band, I started visiting the neighbouring estates, relatives and acquaintances in search of amorous encounters. Thus I found myself on the estate of my uncle on my mother’s side, a retired and long-widowed uhlan, Cherkasov, the father of an only daughter, my cousin Sonya…

I arrived late and was met inside the house by Sonya alone. When I leapt out of the tarantass and ran into the dark hallway, she emerged into it wearing a flannel dressing gown, holding a candle high in her left hand, she presented me with her cheek for a kiss, and said, shaking her head with her usual mockery:

“Ah, the young man who is always and everywhere late!”

“Well, but this time through no fault of his own at all,” I replied. “It wasn’t the young man that was late, but the train.”

“Quiet, everyone’s asleep. They were dying of impatience and expectation the whole evening, but in the end gave up on you. Papa went off to bed angry, calling you a featherbrain and Yefrem, who was evidently staying at the station until the morning train, an old fool. Natalie went off in a huff, the servants dispersed as well, I alone proved patient and faithful to you… Well, take off your things and we’ll go and have supper.”

I replied, admiring her blue eyes and raised arm, which was exposed right up to the shoulder:

“Thank you, dear friend. It’s particularly pleasant for me to be assured of your fidelity now – you’ve become an absolute beauty, and I have the most serious designs upon you. What an arm, what a neck, and how seductive that soft dressing gown is, probably with nothing underneath it!”

She laughed:

“Almost nothing. But you’ve become quite all right too, and very much a grown-up. The lively gaze and the vulgar little black moustache… Only what has happened to you? In these two years that I haven’t seen you, you’ve turned from a little boy, forever blushing out of shyness, into a very prepossessing cad. And that would have promised us many an amorous delight, as our grandmothers used to say, if it weren’t for Natalie, with whom you’ll fall in love to the grave straight away tomorrow morning.”

“And who’s Natalie?” I asked, following her into the dining room, lit by a bright hanging lamp and with its windows open to the blackness of the warm and quiet summer’s night.

“She’s Natasha Stankevich, my friend from school, who’s come to stay with me. And now she really is a beauty, unlike me. Imagine: a delightful little head, so-called ‘golden’ hair and black eyes. And not eyes even, but black suns, to put it the Persian way. Enormous eyelashes, of course, and black as well, and the amazing golden colour of her face, shoulders and everything else.”

“What else?” I asked, more and more delighted with the tone of our conversation.

“Tomorrow morning I’ll be swimming with her – I advise you to steal into the bushes, then you’ll see what. And a figure like a young nymph…”

On the table in the dining room there were cold cutlets, a piece of cheese and a bottle of red Crimean wine.

“Don’t be angry, there’s nothing else,” she said, sitting down and pouring wine for me and for herself. “And there’s no vodka. Well, God grant, we’ll at least clink glasses of wine.”

“And what should God grant in particular?”

“That I find a fiancé soon who’s prepared to come ‘into our yard’. I’ve already turned twenty, you know, and I can’t possibly marry and go somewhere else: who ever would Papa be left with?”

“Well, God grant!”

And we clinked glasses and, after slowly draining the whole glass, with a strange grin she began gazing at me, at the way I worked with my fork, saying as though to herself:

“No, you’re not bad, like a Georgian, and quite handsome; you really were very skinny and green in the face before. All in all you’ve changed a lot, become easy and pleasant. Only your eyes are shifty.”

“That’s because you’re disturbing me with your charms. After all, you aren’t entirely the same as you used to be either…”

And I examined her cheerfully. She was sitting on the other side of the table, the whole of her on the seat of the chair with one leg bent beneath her and one plump knee upon the other, rather sideways on to me; the even tan of her arm gleamed under the lamp, her lilac-blue, smiling eyes shone, and her thick soft hair, done up for the night into one big plait, was shot with reddish chestnut; the collar of her dressing gown had come open and revealed a round, tanned neck and the beginning of a growing bust, on which there also lay a triangle of suntan; on her left cheek she had a mole with a pretty curl of black hair.

“Well, and how’s your papa?”

Still continuing to gaze with that same grin, she took a small silver cigarette case and a silver box of matches from her pocket and, with even a certain excessive deftness, she lit up, shifting on the hip that was pressed beneath her:

“Papa, thank God, is up to the mark. Upright and firm as before, taps around with a crutch, fluffs up his grey quiff, secretly dyes his moustache and whiskers with something brown, throws bold looks at Khristya… Only he shakes and rocks his head even more than before, more persistently. It looks as if he never agrees with anything,” she said with a laugh. “Do you want a cigarette?”

I lit one, although I did not yet smoke at the time, and she again poured wine for me and for herself and looked into the darkness beyond the open window:

“Yes, for the moment, thank God, everything’s fine. And it’s a beautiful summer – and what a night, eh? Only the nightingales have already quietened down. And I really am very glad to see you. I sent for you to be fetched as early as six o’clock, I was afraid Yefrem, who’s gone senile, would be late for the train. I was waiting for you most impatiently of all. And then I was even pleased that everyone had dispersed and you were late, and if you came, we’d sit for a while on our own. For some reason I did think you’d have changed a lot – with people like you that’s the way it always is. And you know, it’s such a pleasure – sitting alone in the whole house on a summer’s night when you’re waiting for someone from the train, and finally hearing they’re coming, the bells are jangling, they’re driving up to the porch…”

I took her hand across the table firmly and held it in my own, already feeling a thirst for the whole of her body. With cheerful tranquillity she was blowing smoke rings from her lips. I dropped her hand and said, as though joking:

“You talk about Natalie… No Natalie will compare with you… Incidentally, who is she, where’s she from?”

“She’s like us, from Voronezh, from a splendid family, once very rich but now simply destitute. They speak English and French in the house but there’s nothing to eat… A very touching little girl, nice and slender, still fragile. A clever thing, only very reserved, you can’t work out at once whether she’s clever or stupid… These Stankeviches are near neighbours of your dearest cousin Alexei Meschersky, and Natalie says he seems to have started dropping in on them quite often and complaining about his bachelor life. But she doesn’t like him. And then he’s rich – people will think she’s married for money, sacrificed herself for her parents.”

“Right,” I said. “But let’s get back to business. Natalie, Natalie, but what about the romance between you and me?”

“Natalie won’t interfere with our romance anyway,” she replied. “You’ll be mad with love for her, but you’ll be kissing with me. You’ll cry on my breast at her cruelty, and I’ll comfort you.”

“But you do know, don’t you, that I’ve been in love with you for ages.”

“Yes, but that was the usual infatuation with a cousin, wasn’t it, and what’s more, it was all just too clandestine, you were only ridiculous and boring then. But all right, I forgive you your former stupidity and I’m prepared to begin our romance straight away, tomorrow, in spite of Natalie. But for now, we’re going to bed, I need to get up early tomorrow to deal with the housekeeping.”

And she stood up, pulling the dressing gown together, picked up the almost burnt-out candle in the hall and led me to my room. And on the threshold of that room, rejoicing and wondering at the same thing I had been wondering and rejoicing at in my heart all supper – the oh so fortunate success for my amorous hopes that had suddenly fallen to my lot at the Cherkasovs’ – I spent a long time greedily kissing her and pressing her against the door frame, while she closed her eyes duskily and let the dripping candle drop ever lower. Leaving me with her face crimson, she wagged a finger at me and said:

“Only watch out now: in front of everyone tomorrow, don’t you dare devour me with ‘passionate looks’! God forbid that Papa should notice anything. He’s dreadfully scared of me, and I of him even more so. And I don’t want Natalie to notice anything either. I’m very bashful, you know, please don’t judge by the way I’m behaving with you. And if you don’t carry out my order, I’ll immediately begin to find you repugnant…”

I undressed and dropped into bed with my head in a spin, but I instantly fell into a sweet sleep, worn out with happiness and tiredness, not suspecting in the least what great unhappiness awaited me up ahead, nor that Sonya’s jokes would turn out not to be jokes.

I subsequently remembered more than once, as a sinister sort of omen, that when I entered my room and struck a match to light a candle, a large bat softly flung itself in my direction. It flung itself so close to my face that even by the light of the match I could clearly see its loathsome, dark velvetiness and big-eared, snub-nosed, predatory, deathlike little snout, and then, quivering disgustingly and contorting itself, it dived into the blackness of the open window. But at the time I forgot about it straight away.