The Godmother

Dachas in pine forests outside Moscow. A shallow lake, bathing huts beside marshy banks.

One of the most expensive dachas not far from the lake: a house in the Swedish style. Beautiful old pines and bright flower beds in front of an extensive terrace.

The lady of the house is in a light, smart, lacy matinee coat all day, radiant with the beauty of a thirty-year-old woman of the merchant class and the tranquil contentment of summer life. Her husband leaves for the office in Moscow at nine in the morning and returns at six in the evening, strong, tired, hungry, and immediately goes to bathe before dinner, he undresses with relief in a bathing hut that has been heated up during the day, and he smells of healthy sweat, of a sturdy common man’s body…

An evening at the end of June. The samovar has not yet been cleared away from the table on the terrace. The lady of the house is preparing berries for jam. A friend of her husband’s, who has come to stay at the dacha for a few days, is smoking and looking at her sleek, round arms, bare to the elbow. (A connoisseur and collector of ancient Russian icons, an elegant man of wiry build with a small, trimmed moustache, with a lively gaze, dressed as for tennis.) He looks and says:

“Godmother, may I kiss your hand? I can’t look at you in peace.”

“My hands are covered in juice,” and she holds up a shiny elbow.

Just touching it with his lips, he hesitantly says:

“Godmother…”

“What, godfather?”

“You know, there’s this story: a man’s heart went out of his hands and he said to his mind: goodbye!”

“How do you mean, his heart went out of his hands?”

“It’s from Saadi, godmother. There was a Persian poet of that name.”

“I know. But what does ‘his heart went out of his hands’ mean?”

“It means that the man fell in love. The way I have with you.”

“It seems as if you’ve said to your mind goodbye as well.”

“Yes, godmother, I have.”

She smiles absent-mindedly, as though occupied only with her own work.

“On which I congratulate you.”

“I’m being serious.”

“Good health.”

“It’s not good health, godmother, it’s a very grave illness.”

“You poor thing. You should get it seen to. And have you had it long?”

“I have, godmother. Do you know since when? Since the day when, out of the blue, you and I were godparents for the Savelyevs – I don’t understand what possessed them to invite specifically you and me to be godparents… Do you remember what a blizzard there was that day and how you arrived all covered in snow, excited by the fast driving and the blizzard, how I myself took your sable coat off you, and you went into the reception hall in a modest, white silk dress, with a little pearl cross at your slightly open bosom, and later you held the child in your arms with your sleeves tucked up, and you stood with me by the font, gazing at me with an embarrassed sort of half-smile?… It was then that something secret began between us, some sort of sinful intimacy, our kinship, as it already seemed to be, and, because of that, a special lust.”

“Parlez pour vous.”

“And then we sat next to one another at lunch and I couldn’t understand – was it the hyacinths on the table that smelt so wonderful, young and fresh, or was it you?… And it’s since then that I’ve become ill. And I can be cured only by you.”

She gave him a look from under her brows:

“Yes, I remember that day well. And as regards treatment, it’s a shame Dmitry Nikolayevich is spending tonight in Moscow – he’d have recommended a genuine doctor to you straight away.”

“And why is he spending the night in Moscow?”

“He said this morning, as he was leaving for the station, that they have a shareholders’ meeting today before they go away. They’re all going away – some to Kislovodsk, some abroad.”

“But he could have come back on the twelve o’clock.”

“And the farewell drinking session after the meeting at The Mauritania?”

At dinner he was sad and silent, but joked unexpectedly:

“Maybe I should push off to The Mauritania too on the ten o’clock, get completely plastered there and drink ‘Bruderschaft’ with the head waiter?”

She gave him a lengthy look:

“Push off and leave me alone in an empty house? So that’s how you remember the hyacinths!”

And quietly, as if deep in thought, she placed her palm onto his hand as it lay on the table…

After one o’clock in the morning, wearing only a dressing gown, to the distinct ticking of the clock in the dining room, he stole from her bedroom through the dark, quiet house to his own room, in the twilight of which, through the windows that were open onto the garden balcony, there shone the distant, lifeless light of the sunset’s afterglow, which did not go out the whole night long, and there came the smell of nocturnal sylvan freshness. He fell blissfully onto his back on the bed, groped on the bedside table for his matches and cigarette case, lit up greedily and closed his eyes, recalling the details of his unexpected good fortune.

In the morning, the dampness of gentle rain was wafting in through the windows, its drops were beating evenly on the balcony. He opened his eyes, sensed with delight the sweet simplicity of everyday life, thought: “I’ll leave for Moscow today, and the day after tomorrow for the Tyrol or for Lake Garda,” and fell asleep again.

Emerging for lunch, he kissed her hand deferentially and sat down at the table modestly, unfolding a napkin…

“Do forgive me,” she said, trying to be as natural as possible: “only cold chicken and yoghurt. Sasha, bring some red wine, you’ve forgotten again…”

Then, without raising her eyes:

“Please leave today. Tell Dmitry Nikolayevich that you too felt a terrible urge to go to Kislovodsk. I’ll be there in a couple of weeks, and I’ll send him to his parents in the Crimea, they’ve got a marvelous dacha there in Miskhor… Thank you Sasha. You don’t like yoghurt – do you want some cheese? Sasha, bring the cheese, please…”

“‘And are you liking cheese, they asked the hypocrite,’” he said, laughing awkwardly. “Godmother…”

“A fine godmother!”

He took her hand across the table and squeezed it, saying quietly:

“Will you really come?”

She replied in a steady voice, looking at him with a slight smirk:

“And what do you think? I’ll deceive you?”

“How am I to thank you!”

And at once he thought: “And there, in those patent-leather boots, the riding habit and bowler hat, I’ll probably conceive an immediate fierce hatred for her!”

25th September 1943

The Beginning

“Well I, gentlemen, fell in love for the first time, or, to be more accurate, lost my innocence, at about twelve. I was at grammar school then, and was travelling home from town into the country for the Christmas holidays, on one of those warm grey days that so often occur at Christmas-tide. The train was moving through pine forests under deep snow, I was childishly happy and calm, sensing this gentle winter’s day, this snow and these pines, dreaming of the skis awaiting me at home, and I was sitting entirely on my own in the over-heated first-class part of an old-style mixed carriage comprised of just two sections, that is, of four red velvet couches with high backs – it was as if that velvet made it even hotter and stuffier – and four small couches of that same velvet beside the windows on the other side, with an aisle between them and the big ones. I spent more than an hour there, carefree, peaceful and alone. But at the second station from the town the door from the carriage entrance opened, there was a sudden pleasing smell of wintry air, and in came a porter with two suitcases in covers and a holdall of tartan material; behind him was a very pale, black-eyed young lady in a black satin bonnet and an astrakhan fur coat, and behind the lady a strapping gentleman with yellow, owlish eyes wearing a deerskin hat with the earflaps raised, felt boots to above the knees and a brilliant deerskin coat. I, of course, as a well-brought-up boy, immediately rose and moved from the big couch beside the door to the carriage entrance into the second section, but not onto another big couch, rather onto a small one beside a window, facing the first section, so as to have the opportunity to observe the newcomers – after all, children are just as attentively curious about new people as a dog is about unfamiliar dogs. And it was there, on that couch, that my innocence perished. When the porter had put the things onto the rack above the couch on which I had just been sitting, had said to the gentleman, who had thrust a paper rouble into his hand: “Safe journey, Your Highness!” and, with the train already moving, had run out of the carriage, the lady immediately lay down on her back on the couch under the rack with the back of her head on its velvet bolster, and the gentleman, awkwardly, with hands unaccustomed to any work, pulled the holdall down from the rack onto the couch opposite, tugged a little white pillow out of it and, without looking, handed it to her. She said quietly: “Thank you, my dear,” and, pushing it under her head, closed her eyes, while he, after throwing his coat off onto the holdall, stood by the window between the small couches of his section and lit up a fat cigarette, diffusing its aromatic smell densely in the stuffy heat of the carriage. He stood at his full, powerful height, with the earflaps of his deerskin hat sticking up and, it seemed, with his eyes fixed on the pines racing backwards, while I at first kept my eyes fixed on him and felt only one thing: terrible hatred towards him for his having completely failed to notice my presence, his not once having even glanced at me, as though I hadn’t been in the carriage at all – and, on the strength of that, for everything else as well: for his lordly calm, for his princely peasant’s size, predatory round eyes, carelessly neglected chestnut moustache and beard, and even for his heavyweight and roomy brown suit, for his light, velvety felt boots, pulled up above the knees. But not even a minute had passed before I’d already forgotten about him: I suddenly remembered that deathly but beautiful pallor by which I’d been unconsciously struck at the entrance of the lady who was now lying on her back on the couch opposite me, I transferred my gaze to her, and no longer saw anything else besides her, her face and body until the next station, where I needed to get off. She sighed and lay more comfortably, a little lower down; without opening her eyes she flung open her fur coat, worn over a flannel dress; using her feet, she kicked her warm overshoes off her open suede shoes and onto the floor; she removed the silk bonnet from her head and dropped it down beside her – her black hair proved, to my great surprise, to be cut short like a boy’s – then on the right and on the left she unhooked something from her grey silk stockings, raising her dress as far as the bare flesh between it and the stockings, and, adjusting the hem, dozed off: her heliotropic, femininely young lips with dark down above them opened a little, her face, pale to the point of transparent whiteness and with the black eyebrows and lashes very prominent upon it, lost all expression… The sleep of a woman you desire, who draws your whole being to her – you know what that is like! And so for the first time in my life I saw and felt it – until then I’d seen only the sleep of my sister, my mother – and I kept on looking, looking with unmoving eyes and a dry mouth at that boyishly feminine black head, at the motionless face, on the pure whiteness of which the fine black eyebrows and closed black lashes stood out so wonderfully, at the dark down above the parted lips, utterly agonizing in their attractiveness. I was already absorbing and coming to comprehend all there is that is indescribable in the recumbent female body, in the fullness of the hips and the slenderness of the ankles, and with terrifying vividness could still see in my mind that incomparable, delicate, feminine flesh colour which she had accidentally shown me while unhooking something from the stockings underneath her flannel dress. When the jolt of the train stopping in front of our station unexpectedly brought me round, I went staggering out of the carriage into the sweet wintry air. Beyond the wooden station building stood a troika sledge with a pair of greys in harness, their bells jangling, and waiting beside the sledge with a raccoon fur coat in his hands was our old coachman, who said to me in an unfriendly fashion:

“‘Your Mummy said you must be sure to put it on…’

“And I obediently slipped into that coat of my grandfather’s, smelling of fur and wintry freshness, with its huge, already yellow and long-haired collar, I sank into the soft and spacious sledge and, to the muffled, hollow muttering of the bells, began rocking down the deep and soundless road of snow in a cutting through the pines, closing my eyes and still overcome by what I had just experienced, thinking confused and sadly sweet thoughts about that alone – and not about all the nice things from before that awaited me at home along with the skis and the wolf cub, taken in the den of a she-wolf killed during a hunt in August, and now sitting in a pit in our garden, which even in the autumn, when I’d been home for two days for the Intercession, had already given off such a weird and wonderful stench of wild animal.”

23rd October 1943