7

I completed my course, shortly afterwards lost my father and mother almost simultaneously, settled in the country, farmed and took up with an orphaned peasant girl, Gasha, who had grown up in our house and worked in my mother’s rooms… Now, together with Ivan Lukich, our former house serf, an old man grey to the point of green and with big shoulder blades, she worked for me. Her appearance was in part still that of a child – small, thin, black-haired, with expressionless eyes the colour of soot, enigmatically taciturn, as though apathetic about everything, and so dark all over with her delicate skin that my father had once said: “That’s probably what Hagar was like.” She was endlessly dear to me, I liked carrying her in my arms and kissing her; I thought: “This is all that’s left to me in life!” And she seemed to understand what I was thinking. When she gave birth – to a small, black-haired boy – and stopped working, moving into my former nursery, I wanted to marry her. She replied:

“No, I don’t need that, I’d only be ashamed in front of everyone, what sort of a lady am I! And what would you want it for? You’d stop loving me even quicker then. You need to go to Moscow, or else you’ll get totally bored with me. And I won’t get bored now,” she said, gazing at the child, who was in her arms and sucking at her breast. “Go and live for your own pleasure, just remember one thing: if you fall in love with someone properly and have the idea of marrying, I won’t delay for a minute, I’ll drown myself along with him.”

I looked at her – it was impossible not to believe her. I hung my head: yes, and you know, I was only twenty-six years old… Falling in love, marrying – that I could not even imagine, but Gasha’s words had reminded me once more that my life was over.

In early spring I went abroad and spent about four months away. Returning home at the end of June via Moscow, this is what I thought: I’ll spend the autumn in the country, and I’ll go away somewhere again for the winter. On the way from Moscow to Tula I was calmly melancholy: here I am home again, but why? I remembered Natalie – and spread my hands: yes, that love “to the grave’, which Sonya had mockingly foretold for me, does exist; only I had already got used to it, as somebody over the years gets used to the fact that, for example, he has had an arm or a leg cut off… And while sitting at the station in Tula waiting to change trains, I sent a telegram: “Travelling past you from Moscow, will be at your station at 9 p.m., allow me to drop in, learn how you are.”

She met me on the porch – behind her was a maid shining a lamp – and with a half-smile she reached out both her hands to me:

“I’m terribly glad!”

“Strange as it might seem, you’ve grown a little more,” I said, kissing and touching them, already in torment. And I glanced at the whole of her in the light of the lamp, which the maid had raised a little and around the glass of which, in the soft air after rain, little pink moths were circling: the black eyes looked more firmly, more confidently now, she was already in the completely full bloom of young womanly beauty, elegant, modestly smart, in a dress of green tussore.

“Yes, I’m still growing,” she replied, smiling sadly.

In the reception hall, in the front corner, there hung, as before, a large red icon lamp before old gold icons, only it was unlit. I hurried to look away from that corner and followed her through into the dining room. There on a shining tablecloth stood a kettle on a spirit lamp, and there shone a fine tea service. The maid brought cold veal, pickles, a carafe of vodka and a bottle of Lafitte. She took hold of the kettle:

“I don’t eat supper, I’ll just have some tea, but you have something to eat first… You’ve come from Moscow? Why? What is there to do there in the summer?”

“I’m returning from Paris.”

“I say! And were you there long? Oh, if only I could go somewhere! But my little girl’s still not yet four, you know… They say you’re a keen farmer?”

I drank a glass of vodka without eating and asked permission to smoke.

“Oh, please do!”

I lit up and said:

“Natalie, there’s no need for you to be genteelly courteous with me, don’t pay me any particular attention. I’ve dropped in just to take a look at you and then disappear again. And don’t feel any awkwardness – after all, everything that was is long forgotten and gone without return. You can’t help but see that I’m dazzled by you again, but now you can’t be at all inhibited by my admiration – it’s unselfish and calm now…”

She lowered her head and eyelashes – it was impossible ever to get used to the wonderful contrast of the one and the other – and her face began slowly turning pink.

“It’s absolutely certain,” I said, growing pale, but in a strengthening voice, assuring myself that I was telling the truth. “Everything in the world passes, you know. As for my terrible guilt before you, I’m sure it became a matter of indifference to you long, long ago now, and much more understandable, forgivable than before: my guilt was, after all, not entirely of my own free will, and even at that time deserved leniency because of my extreme youth and the amazing combination of circumstances into which I fell. And then I’ve already been punished sufficiently for that guilt – by my complete ruin.”

“Ruin?”

“Isn’t it so, then? Even now don’t you understand me, don’t you know me, as you once said?”

She paused.

“I saw you at the ball in Voronezh… How young I still was then and how amazingly unhappy! Although can there ever be unhappy love?” she said, lifting her face and asking with the entire black expanse of her wide eyes and lashes. “Doesn’t the most mournful music in the world give happiness? But tell me about yourself, surely you haven’t settled in the countryside for ever?”

With an effort I asked:

“So you still loved me then?”

“Yes.”

I fell silent, sensing that now my face was already burning like fire.

“Is it true, what I heard… that you have love, a child?”

“It’s not love,” I said. “Terrible pity, tenderness, but that’s all.”

“Tell me everything.”

And I did tell her everything – even to the point of what Gasha had said to me, advising me to “go and live for my own pleasure”. And I ended like this:

“Now you can see that I’ve been ruined in every possible way…”

“Enough!” she said, thinking some thought of her own. “You still have your whole life ahead of you. But marriage is, of course, impossible for you. She is, of course, one of those people who wouldn’t even spare the child, let alone herself.”

“It’s not a matter of marriage,” I said. “My God! Me marrying!”

She looked at me thoughtfully:

“No, no. And how strange. Your prediction came true – we did become relatives. Do you feel that you’re, after all, my cousin now?”

And she placed her hand on mine:

“But you’re awfully tired after the journey, you haven’t so much as touched a thing. You look dreadful, that’s enough conversation for today, go, a bed’s been made up for you in the pavilion…”

I kissed her hand submissively, she summoned a maid, and with a lamp, although it was quite light from the moon hanging low behind the garden, the latter conducted me, at first by the main avenue, and then by a side one, into a spacious clearing, to that old rotunda with its wooden columns. And I sat down by the open window in the armchair beside the bed and started smoking, thinking: I was wrong to carry out this stupid, sudden action, I was wrong to come here and rely on my calm, my strength… The night was extraordinarily still, and it was already late. There must have been more light rain – the air had become even warmer, softer. And in delightful conformity with that unmoving warmth and stillness, in the distance, in various parts of the village, the first cockerels were protractedly and cautiously crowing. It was as if the light circle of the moon, hanging opposite the rotunda, behind the garden, had frozen in the one spot, as if it were gazing expectantly, shining among the distant trees and the nearby spreading apple trees, mixing its light with their shadows. Where the light spilt through, it was bright and glassy, but the shade was dappled and mysterious… And she, in something long, dark, silkily shiny, came up to the window, so mysteriously, inaudibly too…

Later on, the moon was already shining above the garden and looking straight into the rotunda, and we took it in turn to speak – she lying on the bed, I kneeling alongside and holding her hand.

“On that terrible night with the lightning I already loved just you alone, there was no longer any other passion inside me except the most ecstatic and pure passion for you.”

“Yes, with time I understood everything. And nevertheless, whenever I suddenly recalled that lightning, immediately after memories of what had happened an hour before it in the avenue…”

“Nowhere in the world is there anyone like you. A little while ago, when I was looking at that green tussore and your knees beneath it, I felt I was prepared to die for one touch of it with my lips, just the tussore.”

“Did you never, ever forget me in all these years?”

“Only the way you forget you’re alive, breathing. And what you said was true: there is no unhappy love. Ah, that orange dressing gown of yours, and the whole of you, still almost a little girl, glimpsed fleetingly that morning, the first morning of my love for you! Then your arm in the sleeve of the Little Russian blouse. Then the inclination of your head as you were reading The Precipice, and I mumbled, ‘Natalie, Natalie!’”

“Yes, yes.”

“And then you at the ball – so tall and so terrible in your already womanly beauty – how I wanted to die that night in the rapture of my love and ruin! Then you with a candle in your hand, your mourning dress and your chastity as you wore it. It seemed to me that the candle by your face had become holy.”

“And here you are with me again, and now for ever. But we’ll rarely even see one another – how can I, your secret wife, become your lover, obvious to everyone?”

* * *

In December she died on Lake Geneva in premature labour.

4th April 1941