Войти в систему
Войти с помощью соц. сетей:
One night in Paris in the spring I was walking along a boulevard in the twilight created by the dense, fresh greenery, beneath which the streetlamps had a metallic gleam, I was feeling light and young, and thinking:
Upon a long-familiar street
An ancient house I know,
It had a staircase, dark and steep,
A curtain at its window…
Wonderful lines! And how amazing that it all happened to me once too! Moscow, Presnya, lonely, snowy streets, a little wooden lower-middle-class house – and I, a student, some other I, in whose existence it’s already hard to believe now…
A little light, mysterious,
Till midnight’s hour shone out…
It shone out there too. And the blizzard swirled, and the wind blew the snow off the wooden roof and whisked it about like smoke, and there was a light from upstairs in the mezzanine, behind a red cotton curtain…
Ah, what a wondrous maiden fair
At night-time’s cherished hour
Would meet me with her loosened hair
Within her own sweet bower…
There was that too. The daughter of some sexton in Serpukhov, who’d left her destitute family there and gone away to Moscow to study… And so I’d go up onto the little, wooden, snow-covered porch, tug on a ring of jangling wire that ran into the lobby, and in the lobby the bell would give a tinny tinkle – and on the other side of the door footsteps would be heard running quickly down the steep wooden staircase, the door would open – and it would be her, her shawl and white blouse besprinkled by the wind, by the blizzard… I would rush to kiss her, putting my arms around her against the wind, and we would run upstairs, in the frosty cold and the darkness of the staircase to her little room, cold too, and miserably lit by a kerosene lamp… The red curtain at the window, a table beneath it with the lamp, by the wall an iron bed. I’d throw my greatcoat and cap down anywhere and take her onto my knees, sitting down on the bed, feeling her body, her bones through her skirt… There was no loosened hair, it was braided into quite a meagre, light-brown plait, there was a face typical of the common people, transparent from hunger, a peasant’s eyes that were transparent too, lips of that gentleness you sometimes find in weak girls…
How ardently, not like a child,
Her lips so close to me,
She’d whisper, all atremble, wild:
“Now listen, come let’s flee!”
“Let’s flee!” Where to, why, from whom? How delightful, that fervent, childish silliness: “let’s flee!” There was no “let’s flee” for us. There were those weak lips, the sweetest in the world, in eyes there were hot tears, brought on by an excess of happiness, there was the deep languor of youthful bodies, which made us lean our heads on one another’s shoulders, and her lips were already burning as if in a fever as I unbuttoned her blouse and kissed her milky-white girlish breasts with their points hardening like unripened wild strawberries… Coming to, she would leap up, light the spirit lamp, warm up some weak tea, and we would drink it with white bread and red-rinded cheese, talking endlessly about our future, sensing the winter, the fresh cold being carried in under the curtain, listening to the snow being sprinkled on the window… “Upon a long familiar street an ancient house I know…” What else do I know? I remember seeing her off at the Kursk Station in the spring, hurrying along the platform with her willow basket and her red blanket strapped up in a bundle, running down a long train which was already prepared for departure, looking into the green carriages crammed full of people… I remember her finally clambering up into the doorway of one of them, and talking, saying goodbye and kissing one another’s hands, promising her I’d come to Serpukhov in two weeks’ time… I don’t remember anything else. There was nothing else…
25th May 1944
Inside the Prague the chandeliers were glittering, amidst the noise and chatter of dinner time a Portuguese string orchestra was playing, and there was not a single place free. I stood for a little, looking around, and was already meaning to leave when I caught sight of a military doctor I knew, who immediately invited me to his table in a bay beside a window, open to the warm spring night, to the Arbat with its ringing trams. We had dinner together, knocking back a fair amount of vodka and Kakhetian wine and talking about the recently convened State Duma, then asked for coffee. The doctor took out an old silver cigarette case, offered me his Asmolov “cannon” and, lighting up, said:
“Yes, it’s the Duma this, the Duma that… Shall we have some brandy? I’m feeling a bit sad.”
I took this for a joke, as he was a tranquil and rather dry man by nature (strong and powerful in build, very well-suited to military uniform, stiffly ginger-haired, with silver on the temples), but he added seriously:
“Sad because of the spring, probably. With the approach of old age, and a dreamy, bachelor’s one what’s more, you become generally much more sensitive than in your youth. Can you sense the smell of poplars and the resonance of the trams’ ringing? Incidentally, let’s close the window, it’s not very cosy,” he said, getting up. “Ivan Stepanych, some Shustovsky…”
He was absent-mindedly silent while old Ivan Stepanych went to fetch the Shustovsky. When it was served, and we had each been poured a glass, he kept the bottle on the table and, gulping the brandy down from a hot cup too, continued:
“There’s this as well – certain memories. The poet Bryusov was in here just before you with some slim little lass who looked like a poor student; in his burring, nasally baying voice he shouted something distinct, sharp and angry at the head waiter, who’d come running up to him, evidently with apologies for the absence of free seats – space had probably been reserved on the telephone, but not kept – then he haughtily left. You know him well, but I’m acquainted with him a little too, I come across him in circles interested in old Russian icons – I’m interested in them too, and have been for a long time now, ever since the towns on the Volga where I once served for several years. And besides that, I’ve heard enough about him, about his affairs among other things, and so I think both you and I would have experienced identical feelings towards this girl, undoubtedly the latest in his line of admirers and victims. She was dreadfully touching, but also pitiful, looking in confusion and rapture first at the for her probably utterly unwonted brilliance of the restaurant, then at him, while he was barking out his declamation with his black eyes and eyelashes sparkling demonically. And it was this that brought back memories to me. I’ll tell you one of them, evoked specifically by him, since the orchestra’s leaving and we can sit quietly for a while…”
He was already flushed from the vodka, the wine and the brandy, the way that red-haired people always flush from drinking wine, but he poured us both another glass.
“I recalled,” he began, “how some twenty years ago, a certain quite young military doctor – that is, to put it bluntly, I myself – was walking one day through the streets of a town on the Volga. Walking along doing nothing important, to drop some letter or other into a postbox, with that carefree well-being in my soul that a man sometimes experiences without any reason in good weather. And the weather then was, sure enough, beautiful, a quiet, dry, sunny evening at the beginning of September, when fallen leaves on the pavements rustle so pleasantly under your feet. And so, thinking about something or other, by chance I raise my eyes and see: walking in front of me at a rapid pace and as though preoccupied, is a very smart girl in a grey suit, in a prettily curved grey hat, with a grey parasol in a hand encased in an olive-green kid glove. I see her and sense that there’s something about her that I like terribly, and apart from that it seems somewhat strange: why is she hurrying so, and where to? You might not have thought there was anything to be surprised about – people can have all sorts of urgent business. But all the same, for some reason it intrigues me. Unconsciously I quicken my own step too, almost catch up with her – and, it turns out, a good thing too. Ahead, on a corner, is a low, old church, and I can see she’s heading straight towards it, although it’s a weekday and an hour when there’s not yet any service in the churches. There, having run up onto the church porch, she opens the heavy door with difficulty, and again I go after her and, on entering, stop by the threshold. The church is empty and, not seeing me, with a quick, light step, evenly and elegantly she goes towards the ambo, crosses herself and lithely gets down on her knees, she throws back her head, dropping the parasol on the floor, presses her hands to her breast and gazes at the altar with, by the look of everything, that insistently imploring gaze with which people ask for God’s help, either in great sorrow or in ardent desire for something. Through a narrow window with an iron grille to the left of me the yellowish evening light is shining, tranquil and as though age-old and pensive too, but ahead, in the vaulted and squat depths of the church, it’s already twilight, there’s only the flickering gold of the rizas, hammered with wonderful ancient crudeness, on the icons of the altar wall, and she, on her knees, doesn’t take her eyes off them. The slender waist, the lyre shape of her backside, the heels of her light, delicate shoes with their toes pressed against the floor… Then several times she clasps a handkerchief to her eyes, quickly picks her parasol up from the floor as if resolved upon something, gets up lithely, runs towards the way out, suddenly sees my face – and I’m simply staggered by the beauty of the most terrible fright which has flashed all of a sudden in eyes shining with tears…”
In the next room the chandelier went out – the restaurant had already emptied – and the doctor glanced at the clock.
“No, it’s not late yet,” he said. “Only ten. You’re not hurrying off anywhere? Well then, let’s stay sitting a little longer and I’ll finish telling you this quite strange story. Strange about it first and foremost was the fact that the same evening – that is, to be more precise, late that evening – I met her again. I suddenly took it into my head to go to a summer inn on the Volga where I’d been only two or three times over the entire summer, and then only to sit in the river air after a hot day in town. Why I went specifically on that already fresh evening, God knows: it was as if something was directing me. Of course, you could say that it was simply chance: the man went along, having nothing else to do, and there’s nothing surprising in a new chance meeting. It stands to reason, it’s all entirely true. But then why was there something else too, that is, the fact that I’d met her the devil knows where, and that suddenly those vague conjectures and premonitions of some kind that I’d experienced when first I saw her and the concentration, the mysterious, disturbing sort of purpose with which she’d been going to the church, and with which, in such tension and silence – that is, with that most important, most genuine something that there is in us – had there been praying to God for something, had proved justified? Arriving, and having forgotten about her completely, I sat alone and miserable for a long time in this riverside inn – very expensive, by the way, famous for the nocturnal binges of merchants that not infrequently cost thousands – and I swallowed Zhigulyovskoye beer from time to time without tasting it at all, remembering the Rhine and the Swiss lakes, where I’d been in the summer of the previous year, and thinking about how vulgar all provincial Russian places of out-of-town entertainment are, and in particular those on the Volga… Have you visited the towns along the Volga and inns of that sort on the water, on piles?”
I replied that I knew the Volga little and had not been in any floating restaurants there, but could easily imagine them.
“Well, of course,” he said. “The Russian provinces are everywhere pretty much identical. There’s only one thing there that’s like nothing else – the Volga itself. From early spring and until the winter it’s always and everywhere extraordinary, in any weather, and by day or by night regardless. At night, for example, you sit in such an inn, look out of the windows which make up three of its walls, and when on a summer’s night they’re all open to the air, you look straight into the darkness, into the blackness of the night, and somehow you get a particular sense of all that wild grandeur of the watery expanses beyond them: you see thousands of scattered multicoloured lights, you hear the splashing of rafts going by, the voices of the men on them, or on barges or belyanas, as they call to and fro, their cries warning one another, the many-toned music of now booming, now low steamer hooters and, merging with them, the thirds of some little river steamboats, racing along swiftly, you remember all those brigandly and Tatar words – Balakhna, Vasil-Sursk, Cheboksary, Zhiguly, Batraky, Khvalynsk – and the terrible hordes of dockers on their jetties, then all the incomparable beauty of the old Volga churches – and all you can do is shake your head: how truly incomparable with anything is this Rus of ours! But if you look around – what exactly is it, this inn? A building on piles, a shed made of logs with windows in crude frames, filled with tables under white but dirty tablecloths with heavy, cheap cutlery, where the salt in the salt cellars is mixed with pepper and the napkins smell of grey soap; a plank platform, a cheap theatre stage – that is, for balalaika and accordion players and female harpists – lit along the back wall by kerosene lamps with blinding tin reflectors; flaxen-haired waiters, the owner from peasant stock with thick hair, with the little eyes of a bear – and how can all this be married up with the fact that a thousand roubles’ worth of Mumm and Roederer is forever being drunk here in a night! Yet you know, all that is Rus too… But aren’t you sick of me?”
“Heavens, no!” I said.
“Well, allow me to finish then. What I’m driving at with all this is what a smutty place I suddenly met her in again in all her pure, noble charm, and with what a companion! Towards midnight the inn began to come to life and fill up: they lit a huge and terribly hot lamp beneath the ceiling, the lamps around the walls and the little lamps on the wall behind the platform, an entire regiment of waiters emerged, and a crowd of guests poured in: of course, merchants’ sons, clerks, contractors, steamer captains, a troupe of actors who were in the town on tour… contorting themselves in a depraved manner, the waiters began running around with trays, loud chatter and raucous laughter started up in the groups at the tables, tobacco smoke began floating around, out onto the platform to sit down in two rows along its sides came balalaika players in operatic peasants’ shirts, nice clean puttees and nice new bast shoes, and behind them came a choir of well-rouged and powdered little tarts, who stood in a line with their hands clasped identically behind their backs, and who, with shrill voices and faces expressing nothing, joined in with the balalaikas as they started ringing away in a mournful, long-drawn-out song about some sad ‘warrior’, who had apparently returned from a long spell of Turkish captivity: ‘Hi-is fa-a-amily they kne-ew him not, they asked the-e sooldi-er who-o-o are you…’ Then out with a huge accordion in his hands came some ‘renowned Ivan Grachov’, who sat down on a chair by the very edge of the platform and gave his thick, tow-coloured hair, loutishly parted down the middle, a shake: the brutish face of a floor-polisher, a yellow kosovorotka, embroidered along the high collar and hem with red silk, the braid of a red belt with the tassels dangling low, new boots with patent-leather tops… He gave his hair a shake, settled the three-row accordion with black-and-gold bellows on his raised knee, directed his blank eyes somewhere upwards, performed a devil-may-care run across the buttons – and began to make them growl and sing, bending, twisting and stretching the bellows like a thick snake, running across the buttons with the most amazing flourishes, and ever louder, more decisively and with more variations, then he jerked up his face, closed his eyes and broke into a feminine voice: ‘I was strolling in the meadows, for to drive away my grief…’ And it was at that very moment I saw her, and of course she wasn’t alone: I’d just then got up to summon a waiter and pay for the beer, and I simply let out a gasp: a door behind the platform opened from the outside and she appeared in some sort of khaki-coloured peaked cap, in a waterproof coat of the same colour with a belt – true, she was amazingly good-looking in all this, resembling a tall boy – and after her, holding her by the elbow, someone of no great height in a poddyovka and a nobleman’s cap, dark-faced and already wrinkled, with black, restless eyes. And you understand, I simply went blind with rage, as they say! I recognized in him an acquaintance of mine, a landowner who’d squandered all his money, a drunkard, a libertine, a former lieutenant in the hussars who’d been expelled from his regiment, and, considering nothing, without thinking, I rushed forward between the tables so impetuously that I reached him and her almost at the entrance – Ivan Grachov was still crying: ‘I was seeking pretty flowers for to send unto my love…’ When I ran up to them, he, with a glance at me, managed to cry out cheerfully: ‘Ah, Doctor, hello,’ while she paled to a deathly shade of blue, but I pushed him away and whispered to her furiously: ‘You in this tavern! At midnight, with a debauched drunkard, a card sharp, known to the whole district and town!’ I grabbed her by the arm, threatening to maim him if she didn’t get out of there with me that very minute. He was rooted to the spot – what could he do, knowing that with these hands I could break horseshoes! She turned and, bowing her head, set off towards the exit. I caught up with her under the first streetlamp on the cobbled embankment and took her by the arm – she didn’t raise her head and didn’t free her arm. After the second streetlamp, beside a bench, she stopped and, burying her head against me, began shaking with tears. I sat her down on the bench, holding on with one hand to her dear, slender, girlish hand, wet with tears, and putting my other arm around her shoulder. She was speaking incoherently: ‘No, it’s not true, it’s not true, he’s a good man… he’s unhappy, but he’s kind, generous, carefree…’ I was silent – to object was useless. Then I hailed a passing cabman. She quietened down, and in silence we rode up into the town. In the square she said quietly: ‘Now let me go, I’ll walk the rest of the way, I don’t want you to know where I live,’ and, suddenly kissing my hand, she slipped out and, without looking back, set off awkwardly at an angle across the square… I never saw her again, and I still don’t know to this day who she was, what she was…”
When we had settled up, put on our things downstairs and gone out, the doctor went with me as far as the corner of the Arbat, and we paused to say goodbye. It was empty and quiet – until new animation towards midnight, until people left the theatres and suppers in restaurants, both in and out of town. The sky was black, the streetlamps’ sparkle was pure under the young, pretty greenery on Prechistensky Boulevard, there was the soft smell of the spring rain which had dampened the roadways while we had been sitting in The Prague…
“But you know,” said the doctor, looking around, “I was sorry later that I’d, so to speak, saved her. I’ve known other incidents of that kind too… But why, permit me to ask, did I interfere? Isn’t it all the same what makes a person happy and how? Consequences? But they always exist just the same, don’t they: I mean, cruel traces remain in your soul from everything – memories, that is, which are especially cruel and agonizing if you’re remembering something happy… Well, goodbye, I was very glad to meet with you…”
27th October 1943
Войти с помощью соц. сетей: