The Raven

My father looked like a raven. This occurred to me when I was still a boy: one day I saw a picture in The Cornfield, a cliff of some sort, and on it Napoleon with his white belly and buckskin breeches in short black boots, and suddenly I burst out laughing with joy, remembering the pictures in Bogdanov’s Polar Travels – Napoleon seemed to me so like a penguin – and then I thought sadly: and Papa’s like a raven…

My father held a very prominent official post in our province’s main town, and this spoilt him still more: I think that even in the society of bureaucrats to which he belonged, there was not a man more difficult, more sullen, taciturn and coldly cruel in his sluggish words and deeds. Short, portly, a little stooping, coarsely black-haired, dark, with his long, clean-shaven face and big nose, he really was an absolute raven – especially when he was in his black tailcoat at our governor’s wife’s charity evenings and stood, stooping and sturdy, beside some kiosk in the form of a Russian peasant’s hut, turning his big raven’s head, looking askance with his shining raven’s eyes at those dancing, at those coming up to the kiosk, and at the boyar’s wife too, who, with an enchanting smile, was handing out coupes of yellow, cheap champagne from the kiosk with a large diamond-studded hand – a strapping lady in brocade and a peasant’s headdress with a nose so pinky-white with powder that it seemed artificial. Father was long widowed, he only had the two of us children – my little sister Lilya and I – and our spacious official apartment on the first floor of one of the official buildings, which had its facades looking out onto the boulevard, filled with poplars between the cathedral and the main street, shone coldly and emptily with its huge, mirror-clean rooms. Fortunately, I lived for more than half the year in Moscow, studying at Katkov’s Lycée, and came home only for Christmas-tide and the summer holidays. That year, however, I was met at home by something completely unexpected.

In the spring of that year I graduated from the Lycée and, arriving from Moscow, I was simply staggered: it was as if the sun had suddenly begun shining in our apartment, formerly so dead – the whole of it was illuminated by the presence of the youthful, light-footed girl who had just replaced eight-year-old Lilya’s nanny, a lanky, flat-chested old woman who had looked like a medieval wooden statue of some saint. A poor girl, the daughter of one of my father’s minor subordinates, she was endlessly happy in those days at having found herself such a good position immediately after school, and then also at my arrival, the appearance in the house of someone of her own age. But how fearful she was, how timid in front of my father at our prim dinners, continually watching anxiously over black-eyed Lilya, taciturn too, yet abrupt not only in every one of her movements, but even in her taciturnity, as though she were constantly waiting for something, and forever turning her little black head back and forth in a way that was somehow defiant! My father had become unrecognizable at dinner: he did not throw severe glances at old Gury, who brought him his food wearing knitted gloves, but kept on talking – sluggishly, but talking – speaking, of course, only to her, addressing her with great formality by her first name and patronymic – “my dear Yelena Nikolayevna” – and he even tried to joke and grin. But she was so embarrassed that she would reply with only a piteous smile, with spots of scarlet appearing on her refined and delicate face – the face of a slim, blond-haired girl in a light white blouse with its armpits dark from her hot, youthful sweat, and beneath which were the outlines of her small breasts. She did not even dare raise her eyes to me at dinner: here I was even more terrifying for her than my father. But the more she tried not to see me, the colder were my father’s sidelong looks in my direction: not only he, but I too, understood, sensed, that behind this torturous trying not to see me, but rather to listen to my father and keep an eye on the cross and fidgety, albeit also taciturn Lilya, there was concealed a completely different fear – the joyous fear of our shared happiness at being beside one another. In the evenings my father had always had tea while busy with something else, and previously he had been served his large, gold-rimmed cup at his desk in his study: now he had tea with us, in the dining room, and she sat at the samovar – Lilya was already asleep at that hour. He would emerge from the study in a long and loose-fitting double-breasted jacket with a red lining, settle down in his armchair and reach his cup out to her. She would fill it to the brim, as he liked, pass it to him with a trembling hand, pour for me and herself and, lowering her eyelashes, do some needlework; and he would unhurriedly say – something very strange:

“Blondes, my dear Yelena Nikolayevna, are suited either by black or crimson… Now your face would be very much suited by a dress of black satin with a jagged standing collar а la Mary, Queen of Scots, studded with small diamonds… or a medieval dress of crimson velvet with a little décolletage and a ruby crucifix… A coat of dark-blue Lyons velvet and a Venetian beret would suit you too… It’s all dreams, of course,” he would say, grinning. “Your father gets only seventy-five roubles a month from us, and apart from you he has another five children, each smaller than the next – and so most likely you’ll have to live your whole life through in poverty. But then again: what’s wrong with dreams? They enliven you, impart strength and hope. And then isn’t it sometimes the case that certain dreams suddenly do come true? Rarely, it stands to reason, very rarely, but they do… I mean, didn’t a cook at the station in Kursk recently win two hundred thousand with a lottery ticket – a simple cook!”

She tried to pretend that she took all of this as pleasant jokes, she forced herself to glance at him, to smile, while I, as though not even hearing anything, played Napoleon patience. And once he went even further – he suddenly said, nodding in my direction:

“This young man here probably dreams as well: you know, Daddy’ll be dead in a little while and there’ll be no end to the gold! And there will indeed be no end to it, because there’ll be no beginning either. It stands to reason, Daddy does have something – for example, a little estate of a thousand hectares of black earth in Samara Province – only it’s unlikely his little son will inherit it, he doesn’t really favour Daddy with his love very much and, as far as I can see, he’ll turn out a first-class spendthrift…”

This last conversation was the evening before Peter’s Day – which was most memorable for me. In the morning of that day Father left for the cathedral, and from the cathedral for the home of the governor, who was celebrating his name day. On working days he never had lunch at home anyway, and so that day too the three of us had lunch together, and towards the end of the lunch, when cherry blancmange was served instead of her favourite pastry straws, Lilya began shouting shrilly at Gury and banging her fists on the table; she hurled her plate down on the floor, started shaking her head, and choked on her angry sobs. We somehow dragged her to her room – she kicked out and bit our hands – and begged her to calm down, promising to punish the cook severely, and she finally quietened down and fell asleep. How much timid tenderness there was for us just in that alone – in our combined efforts in dragging her along and in continually touching one another’s hands! The rain was making a noise outside, lightning flashed at times in the darkening rooms and the thunder made the window panes shake.

“It’s the thunderstorm that’s had this effect on her,” she whispered joyously when we had gone out into the corridor, and then suddenly she pricked up her ears:

“Oh, there’s a fire somewhere!”

We ran into the dining room and threw open a window – the fire brigade was rushing past us along the boulevard with a clatter. Fast, torrential rain was pouring onto the poplars – the thunderstorm had already finished, as though the rain had extinguished it – and amid the clatter of the long, rushing cart, with the bronze helmets of the firemen standing on it, the hoses and ladders, amid the ringing of the shaft-bow bells above the manes of the black cart horses, which, with a crashing of horseshoes, sped the cart at a gallop over the cobbled roadway, gently, devilishly playfully, the horn of the bugler was singing in warning… Then ever so rapidly, the alarm began to be sounded on the bell tower of St John the Warrior in Lavy… We stood close beside one another at the window, through which came the fresh smell of water and the wet dust of the city, and we seemed only to be watching and listening with intent agitation. Then there was a glimpse of the final cart with some sort of huge red cistern on it, and my heart began beating harder, my forehead tightened, I took her hand, which hung lifelessly beside her hip, and gazed imploringly at her cheek, and she began to go pale, she parted her lips a little, lifted her breast in a sigh and, as though also imploringly, turned her eyes, bright and full of tears, towards me, while I seized her shoulder and for the first time in my life was overcome in the gentle cold of a girl’s lips… After that there was not a single day without our hourly, seemingly chance meetings, now in the drawing room, now in the reception hall, now in a corridor, even in my father’s study – he came home only towards evening – those short meetings and despairingly long kisses, insatiable and already intolerable in their irresolvability. And Father, sensing something, again stopped coming out into the dining room for evening tea, and again became taciturn and sullen. But we no longer paid him any attention, and she became calmer and more serious at dinner.

At the beginning of July Lilya fell ill after eating too many raspberries and lay recovering slowly in her room, constantly drawing fairy-tale towns with coloured pencils on large sheets of paper pinned to a board, and, like it or not, she did not leave her bedside, but sat embroidering a Little Russian blouse for herself – it was impossible to leave it: Lilya was demanding something every minute. And I was perishing in the empty, quiet house from a ceaseless, agonizing desire to see her, to kiss her and press her against me. I sat in my father’s study, taking whatever came to hand from his library bookcases and making efforts to read. That is how I was sitting that time too, just before evening. And then suddenly there was the sound of her light and quick footsteps. I dropped the book and leapt up:

“What, has she gone to sleep?”

She waved a hand:

“Oh, no! You don’t know – she can go two days without sleeping, and that’s fine for her, as for all mad people! She drove me out to look for some yellow and orange pencils in her father’s room…”

And bursting into tears, she came over and dropped her head onto my chest:

“My God, when will it ever end! Just tell him finally that you love me, that nothing in the world is going to part us anyway!”

And lifting her face, wet with tears, she embraced me impulsively and kissed me until she was out of breath. I pressed her whole body against me and drew her towards the couch – could I have considered or remembered anything at that moment? But on the threshold of the study a light coughing could already be heard: I glanced over her shoulder – my father was standing gazing at us. Then he turned and, hunched over, withdrew.

None of us emerged for dinner. In the evening Gury knocked on my door: “Your Daddy requests that you go and see him.” I entered the study. He was sitting in an armchair in front of the desk and, without turning round, he began speaking:

“Tomorrow you’ll leave for my village in Samara for the whole summer. In the autumn, go to Moscow or St Petersburg and find yourself work. If you dare to disobey, I’ll disinherit you for good. But that’s not all: straight away tomorrow I’ll ask the Governor to deport you immediately to the village under guard. Now go, and don’t show yourself in my sight any more. Money to pay for the journey and a certain amount of pocket money you’ll receive via somebody else tomorrow morning. Towards the autumn I’ll write to my village office for them to issue you with a certain sum for your initial living costs in the capitals. Don’t have any hope at all of seeing her before your departure. That’s all, my good man. Go.”

That same evening I left for Yaroslavl Province, for the village of one of my Lycée comrades, and I stayed with him until the autumn. In the autumn, through the patronage of his father, I went to work in St Petersburg in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and I wrote to my father that I was renouncing for ever not only his inheritance, but also assistance of any kind. In the winter I learnt that, having left his post, he had also moved to St Petersburg – “with a delightful young wife”, as I was told. And one evening, entering the stalls of the Maryinsky Theatre a few minutes before the curtain went up, I suddenly saw him and her. They were sitting in a box beside the stage, right by the barrier, on which lay a small mother-of-pearl opera glass. He, in tails, stooping, like a raven, was reading the programme carefully with one eye screwed up. She, holding herself easily and elegantly, with her blond hair piled up high, was looking around animatedly at the warm stalls, sparkling with chandeliers, filling up and softly humming, and at the evening dresses, tails and dress uniforms of the people entering the boxes. At her neck a ruby crucifix glittered with dark fire, her slender, but already rounded arms were bared, and a kind of peplos of crimson velvet was gripped at the left shoulder by a ruby clasp…

18th May 1944