The Swing

On a summer’s evening he was sitting in the drawing room tinkling on the fortepiano, when he heard her footsteps on the balcony, struck the keys wildly and started shouting and singing out of tune:

 

“I envy not the gods and stars,

I envy not the regal tsars

When languid eyes do I remark,

A slender figure, plaits so dark!”

 

She came in wearing a blue sarafan, with two long, dark plaits down her back, a coral necklace, and her blue eyes smiling in her suntanned face:

“Is that all about me? And the aria is of your own composition?”

“Yes!”

And again he struck and shouted:

“I envy not the gods and stars…”

“My, what an ear you’ve got!”

“But then I am a renowned painter. And as handsome as Leonid Andreyev. I’ve come to see you to your cost!”

“He’s frightening, but I’m not afraid, said Tolstoy of your Andreyev.”

“We’ll see, we’ll see!”

“And what about Granddad’s crutch?”

“Granddad, hero of Sebastopol though he might be, is only menacing in appearance. We’ll run away, get married, then throw ourselves at his feet – he’ll burst into tears and forgive us…”

In the twilight, before supper, when aromatic rissoles and onions were being fried in the kitchen and the air was freshening in the dewy park, they stood opposite one another, flying on the swing at the end of the avenue of trees, with the rings screeching and the wind blowing, puffing out the hem of her skirt. Pulling on the ropes and adding to the swinging of the board, he made frightening eyes, and she, red in the face, watched fixedly, senselessly and joyously.

“Halloo! There’s the first star and the new moon, and the sky above the lake is ever so green – look, painter, what a slim little sickle! Moon, moon, golden horns… Oh dear, we’re going to fall!”

Flying down from a height and jumping off onto the ground, they sat down on the board, gazing at one another and trying to contain their agitated breathing.

“Well, then? I told you!”

“Told me what?”

“You’re already in love with me.”

“Perhaps… Hang on, they’re calling us to supper… Halloo, we’re coming, we’re coming!”

“Wait a minute. The first star, the new moon, the green sky, the smell of the dew, the smell from the kitchen – doubtless my favourite rissoles in sour cream again! – and blue eyes and a beautiful, happy face…”

“Yes, I don’t think there’ll ever in my life be an evening happier than this…”

“Dante said of Beatrice: ‘In her eyes is the beginning of love, and the end is in the lips.’ And so?” he said, taking her hand.

She closed her eyes, bending towards him with her head lowered. He put an arm around her shoulders with their soft plaits and lifted her face:

“Is the end in the lips?”

“Yes…”

As they walked up the avenue, he looked where he was putting his feet:

“What are we to do now? Go to Granddad, fall to our knees and ask for his blessing? But what sort of a husband am I?”

“No, no, anything but that.”

“Well, what then?”

“I don’t know. Let there just be what there is… It won’t get any better.”

10th April 1945

Pure Monday

The grey winter’s day in Moscow was darkening, the gas was lighting up coldly in the streetlamps, the windows of the shops were warmly lit – and Moscow’s evening life, freeing itself from the business of the day, was heating up: thicker and faster raced the cab men’s sledges, more heavily thundered the overcrowded diving trams – in the twilight, green stars could already be seen sprinkling from the wires with a hiss – more animated was the haste of the dull black passers-by along the snowy pavements. Every evening at this hour I was sped by my coachman’s extending trotter from the Red Gates to the Church of Christ the Saviour: she lived opposite; each evening I took her to dinner at the Prague, the Hermitage, the Metropole, after dinner to theatres, concerts, and then to the Yar, the Strelna… How it was all going to end, I did not know and tried not to think, I tried not to think it through: it was useless – just as was talking to her about it, for she had deflected conversations about our future once and for all; she was enigmatic, incomprehensible to me, and our relationship was a strange one too – we were still not fully intimate – and all this kept me in endless unresolved tension, in agonizing expectation – and at the same time I was ineffably happy with every hour spent beside her.

She was a student for some reason on women’s courses; she attended quite rarely, but did attend. I asked her once: “Why?” She shrugged a shoulder: “Why does anything get done in the world? Do we really understand anything about our actions? Besides, I’m interested in history…” She lived alone – her widower father, an enlightened man from a distinguished merchant family, lived in retirement in Tver, and, like all such merchants, collected something. For the sake of the view of Moscow she rented a corner apartment on the fourth floor in a building opposite Christ the Saviour, only two rooms, but spacious and well-furnished ones. A lot of space in the first was taken by a wide Turkish couch, there was an expensive piano on which she was forever learning the slow, somnambularly beautiful opening of ‘The Moonlight Sonata’ – just the opening alone – on the piano and on the looking-glass table bloomed showy flowers in cut-glass vases – on my orders she had fresh ones delivered every Saturday, and when I arrived on a Saturday evening, lying on the couch, above which for some reason hung a portrait of a bare-footed Tolstoy, she would unhurriedly extend a hand for me to kiss, and absent-mindedly say “Thank you for the flowers…” I brought her boxes of chocolates, new books – Hofmannsthal, Schnitzler, Tetmayer, Przybyszewski – and got still that same “thank you” and the extended warm hand, sometimes an order to sit down beside the couch without removing my coat. “It’s not clear why,” she would say thoughtfully, stroking my beaver collar, “but I don’t think anything can be better than the smell of wintry air with which you go into a room from outdoors…” It looked as if she needed nothing: not the flowers, nor the books, nor the dinners, nor the theatres, nor the suppers out of town; although there were, nonetheless, some flowers she liked and some she did not, all the books that I brought her she always read, she would eat a whole box of chocolates in a day, at dinner and supper ate no less than me, being fond of open-topped pasties with burbot soup and pink hazel grouse in well-baked sour cream, and she would sometimes say: “I don’t understand how people don’t get fed up with having dinner and supper every day, all their lives” – yet she herself had both dinner and supper with a Muscovite’s understanding of the matter. Her only obvious weakness was good clothing, velvet, silks, expensive fur…

We were both rich, healthy, young and so good-looking that in restaurants and at concerts people’s gazes followed us. Being by birth from the province of Penza, I was then handsome, with, for some reason, southern, passionate good looks; I was even “indecently handsome”, as I was once told by a renowned actor, a monstrously fat man, a great glutton and a clever fellow – “the devil knows who you are, some kind of Sicilian,” he said sleepily – and my character was southern too, lively, constantly ready with a happy smile, a gentle joke. And she had a beauty that was somehow Indian, Persian: a swarthily amber face, magnificent hair, somewhat ominous in its dense blackness, eyebrows that gleamed softly like black sable fur, eyes as black as velvet coal; a captivating mouth with its velvety crimson lips was set off by dark down; when going out, she would most often put on a garnet-coloured velvet dress and similar shoes with gold buckles (whereas she went to her courses as a demure student and had lunch for thirty kopeks at a vegetarian canteen on the Arbat), and as much as I was inclined to garrulity, to simple-hearted cheerfulness, so was she most often taciturn: she was forever thinking about something, forever as though delving into something mentally; lying on the couch with a book in her hands, she would often lower it and gaze questioningly into space. I saw this when I sometimes dropped in on her in the daytime too, because for three or four days each month she would not leave home at all, she would lie and read, making me too sit down in the armchair beside the couch and read in silence.

“You’re terribly talkative and restless,” she said, “let me read to the end of the chapter…”

“If I weren’t talkative and restless, perhaps I would never have got to know you,” I replied, thus reminding her of our meeting: one day in December, having turned up at the Arts Group to a lecture by Andrei Bely, who had sung it while running around and dancing on the stage, I had been fidgeting and chuckling so much that she, who had found herself by chance in the seat next to mine and had at first looked at me with a certain bewilderment, had finally burst out laughing as well, and I had turned to her merrily at once.

“Quite so,” she said, “but be quiet for a little all the same, read something, have a smoke…”

“I can’t be quiet! You can’t imagine all the strength of my love for you! You don’t love me!”

“I can imagine. And as for my love, you know very well that, apart from my father and you, I have no one in the world. In any event, you are my first and last. Is that too little for you? But enough about that. Reading’s impossible with you here, let’s have tea…”

And I would get up, boil the water in the electric kettle on the little table at the end of the couch, take cups and saucers from the walnut cabinet that stood in the corner behind the table, saying whatever came into my head:

“Have you finished reading The Fiery Angel?”

“I’ve finished looking at it. It’s so high flown I’m ashamed to read it.”

“And why did you leave Shalyapin’s concert all of a sudden yesterday?”

“He was excessively flamboyant. And then in general I don’t like yellow-haired Rus.”

“Everything displeases you!”

“Yes, a lot does…”

“A strange love!” I thought, and while the water was coming to the boil, I stood looking out of the window. The room smelt of flowers and was becoming associated for me with their smell; outside one window, low in the distance there lay the huge picture of the snowy, blue-grey Moscow beyond the river; out of the other, further to the left, a part of the Kremlin was visible, and opposite, excessively close somehow, the too new white hulk of Christ the Saviour, in the gold dome of which the jackdaws that eternally circled around it were reflected in bluish spots… “A strange city!” I said to myself, thinking about Hunters’ Row, about Iverskaya, about St Basil’s. “St Basil’s – and the Saviour in the Forest, the Italian cathedrals – and there’s something Kyrgyz about the points of the towers on the Kremlin walls…”

Arriving at twilight, I sometimes found her on the couch in nothing but a sable-trimmed silk caftan – “the legacy of my Astrakhan grandmother,” she said – and I would sit beside her in the semi-darkness without lighting a light, kissing her hands, her feet and her body, which was astonishing in its smoothness… And she did not resist against a thing, but all in silence. I was continually seeking her hot lips – and she gave them, her breathing already spasmodic, but all in silence. And when she sensed that I no longer had the power to control myself, she would push me away, sit up and, without raising her voice, ask me to put on the light, then go off into the bedroom. I would put it on, sit down on the revolving stool beside the piano and gradually come to my senses, cooling after the hot intoxicant. A quarter of an hour later she would emerge from the bedroom dressed, ready to go out, calm and natural, as though nothing had happened beforehand:

“Where to today? The Metropole, perhaps?”

And again all evening we spoke about extraneous things. Soon after we became close, she said to me when I raised the subject of marriage:

“No, I’m not suited to being a wife. I’m not, I’m not…”

This did not make me lose hope – “we’ll see!” I said to myself, in the hope of a change in her decision with time, and I did not raise the subject of marriage any more. Our incomplete intimacy seemed to me sometimes unbearable, but here too – what was left me but reliance on time? One day, sitting beside her in that evening darkness and quiet, I took my head in my hands:

“No, it’s beyond my strength! And to what end, why do you have to torture me and yourself so cruelly?”

She remained silent.

“No, all the same, this isn’t love, it isn’t love…”

She responded evenly out of the darkness:

“Maybe. But who knows what love is?”

“I do, I know!” I exclaimed. “And I’m going to wait until you too find out what love, what happiness is!”

“Happiness, happiness… ‘Our happiness, old pal, is like water in a dragnet: you pull on it – and it fills out, but you pull it out – and there’s nothing there.’”

“What’s that?”

“That’s what Platon Karatayev said to Pierre.”

I waved a hand:

“Oh, to hell with it, that oriental wisdom!”

And again all evening I spoke only about the extraneous – the Arts Theatre’s new production, Andreyev’s new story… Again it was simply enough for me that here I was, first sitting up close to her, gathering speed in a flying sledge, holding her in the smooth fur of her coat, and then entering a crowded restaurant dining room with her to the accompaniment of the march from Aida, eating and drinking next to her, hearing her slow voice, gazing at the lips I had been kissing an hour before – yes, kissing, I said to myself, gazing at them in ecstatic gratitude, at the dark down above them, at the garnet-coloured velvet of her dress, at the slope of her shoulders and the oval of her breasts, smelling the slightly heady scent of her hair, thinking: “Moscow, Astrakhan, Persia, India!” In the out-of-town restaurants, towards the end of supper, when it was becoming noisier and noisier all around in the tobacco smoke, she, smoking and getting tipsy as well, sometimes led me into a private room and asked me to invite the gypsies in, and in they would come, deliberately noisy and boisterous: ahead of the choir, with a guitar on a blue ribbon over his shoulder, an old gypsy in a kazakin with galloons, with the unpleasant blue-grey face of a drowned man, with a head as bare as an iron ball, and behind him the female leader of the choir with a low forehead beneath a tar-black fringe… She listened to the songs with a languorous, strange smile… At three, at four o’clock in the morning I took her home, and on the porch, shutting my eyes in happiness, I kissed the wet fur of her collar and then, in a sort of ecstatic despair, I was flying to the Red Gates. And tomorrow and the day after tomorrow it will still be the same, I thought, still the same torment and still the same happiness… Oh well – happiness all the same, great happiness!

So passed January, February, Shrovetide came and went. On the Sunday of Forgiveness she ordered me to come to her after four o’clock in the afternoon. I arrived, and she met me already dressed, wearing a short astrakhan fur coat, an astrakhan fur hat and black felt overshoes.

“All black!” I said, going in, as always, joyously.

Her eyes were affectionate and quiet:

“It’s already Pure Monday tomorrow, you know,” she replied, taking her hand out of her astrakhan fur muff and giving it to me in a black kid glove. “‘O Lord and Master of my life…’ Do you want to go to the New Maiden Convent?”

I was surprised, but hastened to say:

“Yes, I do!”

“Why always taverns and more taverns?” she added. “Now yesterday morning I was at the Rogozhskoye Cemetery.”

I was even more surprised:

“At a cemetery? Why? Is that the renowned schismatics’ one?”

“Yes, it’s the schismatics’. Pre-Petrine Rus! They were burying their archbishop. And just imagine: the coffin’s an oak log, like in ancient times, the gold brocade looks like hammered metal, the face of the deceased is covered with a white communion cloth embroidered with a large black ornamental design – beauty and dread. And there are deacons by the coffin with images of angels – ripidy, and triple candlesticks – trikiry…”

“How do you know all this? Ripidy, trikiry!”

“It’s just that you don’t know me.”

“I didn’t know you were so religious.”

“It’s not being religious. I don’t know what it is… But, for example, I do often go in the mornings or the evenings, when you’re not dragging me around to restaurants, to the Kremlin cathedrals, yet you don’t even suspect it… And so: the deacons – and what deacons! Peresvet and Oslyabya! And in the two choirs, two sets of singers, all Peresvets as well: tall, mighty, all in long black caftans, singing, responding to one another – first one choir, then the other – and all in unison and not from sheet music, but from ‘neumes’. And the inside of the grave was lined with shiny fir branches, and outside there’s the frost, sunshine, dazzling snow… But no, you don’t understand it! Let’s go…”

The evening was peaceful and sunny, with hoar frost on the trees; on the blood- and brick-red walls of the Convent the jackdaws, looking like nuns, were chattering in the quietness, the chimes kept on playing, thin and sad, in the bell tower. Crunching across the snow in the quietness, we entered the gates and went along snowy paths through the cemetery – the sun had only just gone down, it was still perfectly light, frost-covered boughs were wonderfully silhouetted like grey coral against the gold enamel of the sunset, and glimmering mysteriously around us were the tranquil, mournful lights of a scattering of inextinguishable icon lamps above the graves. I walked behind her and gazed with tenderness at her little track, at the tiny stars left on the snow by her new black overshoes – and sensing this, she suddenly turned around:

“Truly, how you do love me!” she said with quiet bewilderment, shaking her head.

We stood for a while beside the graves of Ertel and Chekhov. Keeping her hands inside her lowered muff, she gazed for a long time at Chekhov’s gravestone, then shrugged a shoulder:

“What a revolting mixture of the sugary Russian style and the Arts Theatre!”

It had begun to get dark, and it was freezing as we slowly walked out of the gates, beside which my Fyodor was obediently sitting on his box.

“Let’s drive around a little more,” she said, “then we’ll go to Yegorov’s to eat the last pancakes… Only not too quick, Fyodor – all right?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Somewhere on Ordynka there’s a house where Griboyedov used to live. Let’s go and look for it…”

And for some reason we went to Ordynka, drove for a long time down lanes of some sort amid gardens, and were in Griboyedov Lane, but who on earth could have shown us which house Griboyedov used to live in – there was not a single passer-by, and would Griboyedov have mattered to anyone? It had already been dark for a long time, and the lighted windows were pink behind the frost-covered trees…

“The Convent of Saints Martha and Mary is here too,” she said.

I laughed:

“Again to a convent?”

“No, I was just saying…”

The lower floor of Yegorov’s tavern in Hunters’ Row was full of shaggy-haired, heavily clad cab men cutting up piles of pancakes with excessive amounts of butter and sour cream poured over them, and it was as steamy as a bathhouse. In the upper rooms, very warm as well with their low ceilings, old-fashioned merchants were washing down fiery pancakes and unpressed caviar with iced champagne. We went through into the second room where, in a corner, an icon lamp was burning in front of the black board of an icon of the Three-handed Madonna, and we sat down at a long table on a black leather couch… The down on her upper lip was covered in frost, the amber of her cheeks was slightly pink, the blackness of her iris had merged completely with the pupil – I could not tear my ecstatic eyes off her face. And taking a handkerchief out of her fragrant muff, she said:

“Splendid! Downstairs wild muzhiks, and here – pancakes and champagne, and a Three-handed Madonna. Three hands! I mean, this is India! You’re a gentleman, you can’t understand all this Moscow business the way I can.”

“I can, I can!” I replied. “And let’s order a ‘mightful’ dinner!”

“What’s that, ‘mightful’?”

“It means mighty. How come you don’t know that? ‘The Speech of Gyurgi’…”

“How splendid! Gyurgi!”

“Yes, Prince Yuri Dolgoruky. ‘The Speech of Gyurgi to Svyatoslav, Prince Seversky’: ‘Come to me, brother, in Muscovy, and order a mightful dinner set out’.”

“How splendid. And it’s only in some northern monasteries that Rus still remains. And in church singing too. I went recently to the Conception Monastery – you can’t imagine how wonderfully the canticles are sung there! And in the Miracle Monastery even better. I kept on going there in Holy Week last year. Ah, how splendid it was! Puddles everywhere, the air already mild, gentleness, sadness in my soul somehow, and all the time this sense of the Motherland, its antiquity… All the doors in the cathedral are open, the common people going in and coming out all day, services all day… Oh, I’ll go away somewhere and enter a convent, the most remote one, in Vologda, Vyatsk!”

I wanted to say that in that case I would go away too, or would murder someone, so that I would be sent to Sakhalin, and I lit a cigarette, forgetting myself in my agitation, but a waiter in white trousers and a white shirt, belted with a raspberry-coloured braid, came up and deferentially reminded me:

“Excuse me, sir, smoking isn’t allowed here…”

And immediately, being particularly obsequious, he started his patter:

“What would you like with your pancakes? Some home-made herb water? Some nice caviar, salmon? To go with the fish soup we have some uncommonly good sherry, and with the cod…”

“Some sherry with the cod too,” she added, delighting me with the friendly loquacity that was not deserting her all evening. And I was listening absent-mindedly now to what she said next. But she spoke with a quiet light in her eyes:

“I love the Russian chronicles and Russian legends so much that I keep rereading the bits I especially like until I’ve learnt them off by heart. ‘There was in the Russian land a town, Murom by name, and in it there ruled a devout prince, Pavel by name. And the Devil introduced a flying serpent to his wife for lechery. And this serpent would come to her in human essence, most beautiful…’”

Joking, I made frightened eyes:

“Oh dear, how awful!”

Without listening, she continued:

“That was the way God tested her. ‘And when the time came for her virtuous demise, this Prince and Princess begged God to let them stand before Him in a single day. And they agreed to be buried in a single coffin. And they ordered two coffin beds to be hewn out in a single stone. And at one and the same time too, they clothed themselves in monastic garments…’”

And again my absent-mindedness gave way to surprise and even alarm – what is the matter with her today?

And then on this evening, when I had taken her home not at all at the usual time, but before eleven o’clock, after saying goodbye to me on the porch, she suddenly detained me as I was already getting into the sledge:

“Wait. Come over tomorrow evening no earlier than ten. Tomorrow it’s the Arts Theatre’s actors’ party.”

“So what?” I asked. “Do you want to go to this actors’ party?”

“Yes.”

“But you said you didn’t know anything more vulgar than these parties!”

“And I don’t now either. And all the same I want to go.”

Mentally I shook my head – all whims, Muscovite whims! – and responded heartily in English:

“All right!”

The next day, at ten o’clock in the evening, having gone up in the lift to her door, I opened it with my key, and did not immediately go in from the dark hallway: it was unusually light beyond it, everything was lit – the chandeliers, the candelabra on the sides of the mirror and the tall lamp beneath a light shade behind the head of the couch – and the piano was ringing out with the opening of ‘The Moonlight Sonata’, ever rising, ringing out ever more agonizingly, invitingly, the further it went, in its somnambularly blissful sadness. I shut the hall door with a bang – the sounds broke off, the rustling of a dress was heard. I went in – she was standing, erect and somewhat theatrical beside the piano, in a black velvet dress which made her slimmer, she was brilliant in its smartness, in the festive arrangement of her jet-black hair, in the swarthy amber of her bare arms and shoulders and the delicate, plump beginnings of her breasts, in the gleaming of the diamond earrings hanging down her lightly powdered cheeks, in the charcoal velvet of her eyes and the velvety purple of her lips. On her temples, black glossy locks curved down in coils towards her eyes, lending her the appearance of an oriental beauty from a traditional popular print.

“Now if I were a singer and sang on the stage,” she said, gazing at my perplexed face, “I’d respond to applause with a friendly smile and slight bows to the right and to the left, upwards and to the stalls, and would imperceptibly but carefully push my train aside with my foot, so as not to step on it…”

At the party she smoked a lot and continually sipped champagne, looking intently at the actors who, with cheery cries and refrains, were imitating something ostensibly Parisian: at big Stanislavsky, with white hair and black eyebrows, and thickset Moskvin, with a pince-nez on his trough-like face, who, with deliberate seriousness and assiduity, both leant back and did a wild cancan to the raucous laughter of the audience. We were approached by Kachalov, pale from drink, with a wine glass in his hand and much sweat on his forehead, onto which there hung a shock of his White Russian hair. Kachalov raised his glass and, gazing at her with affected gloomy greed, said in his deep actor’s voice:

“Maiden Queen, Princess of Shamakha, your health!”

And she smiled slowly and clinked glasses with him. He took her hand, drunkenly bent down to it and almost lost his footing. He righted himself and, gritting his teeth, glanced at me:

“And who’s this handsome fellow? I hate him!”

Then a barrel organ began wheezing, whistling and thundering, jumping up and down and stamping in a polka – and flying and sliding up to us came little, smiling Sulerzhitsky, who was eternally in a hurry; he bent over, imitating the gallantry of a shopkeeper, and hurriedly mumbled:

“Permit me to engage you for the polka tremblant…”

And smiling, she rose and, with a brief tapping of her foot, with her earrings, her blackness and her bare arms and shoulders gleaming, she deftly set off with him between the tables, accompanied by enraptured gazes and clapping, while he, with his head thrown back, cried like a goat:

 

“Let’s go, let’s go, come on quickly,

And I’ll dance the polka with you!”

 

She rose to go, with her eyes half-closed, after two o’clock in the morning. When we had put our coats on, she looked at my beaver hat, stroked my beaver collar, and set off towards the exit, saying, perhaps as a joke, perhaps seriously:

“Handsome, of course. What Kachalov said was true… ‘A serpent in human essence, most beautiful’…”

She was silent as we drove, inclining her head against the bright, moonlit blizzard flying towards us. The full moon was diving in clouds above the Kremlin – “a kind of luminous skull,” she said. On the Spasskaya Tower the clock struck three – she also said:

“What an ancient sound, a thing of tin and cast iron. And in the same way, with the same sound, it struck three in the morning in the fifteenth century too. And the chimes in Florence are just the same, they reminded me of Moscow there…”

When Fyodor drew up by the porch, she ordered lifelessly:

“Let him go…”

Staggered – she had never allowed me up to her apartment at night – I said in perplexity:

“Fyodor, I’ll return on foot…”

And in silence we were drawn up in the lift and went into the nocturnal warmth and quiet of the apartment with the tapping of little mallets in the radiators. I helped her off with her fur coat, slippery with snow, and she threw her wet downy shawl off her hair into my arms and went quickly into the bedroom with her silk underskirt rustling. I took off my things, and with my heart stopping, as if above an abyss, I sat down on the Turkish couch. Her footsteps could be heard beyond the open doors of the illuminated bedroom, and also the way she pulled her dress off over her head, catching it on her hairpins… I got up and approached the doors: she was standing with her back to me in front of the cheval glass wearing nothing but swans-down slippers, brushing out with a tortoiseshell comb the black threads of the long hair hanging down beside her face.

“And he was always saying I didn’t think about him enough,” she said, tossing the comb onto the dressing table, and, throwing her hair behind her back, she turned towards me: “No, I was…”

At dawn I felt her moving. I opened my eyes – she was staring at me. I raised myself a little from the warmth of the bed and her body, and she leant towards me, saying quietly and evenly:

“I’m leaving this evening for Tver. Whether it’s for long, God alone knows…”

And she pressed her cheek against mine – I could feel her wet eyelash blinking:

“I’ll write everything down as soon as I arrive. I’ll write everything about the future. I’m sorry, leave me now, I’m very tired…”

And she lay down on the pillow.

I dressed cautiously, timidly kissed her hair, and went on tiptoe out onto the staircase, which was already lightening with a pale light. I went on foot over the young, sticky snow – the blizzard was over now, all was calm, and it was already possible to see a long way down the streets, and there was the smell both of snow and from the bakeries. I walked as far as the Iverskaya Chapel, the interior of which was glowing hotly and shining with whole bonfires of candles, I knelt down in the crowd of old women and beggars on the trampled snow, and took off my hat… Someone touched me on the shoulder – I looked: a very unfortunate little old woman was gazing at me and pulling a face from tears of pity:

“Ah, don’t grieve, don’t grieve so! It’s a sin, a sin!”

The letter I received two weeks or so later was short – a gentle but firm request not to expect her any more, not to try and find or see her: “I shan’t return to Moscow, for the time being I’m going to become a novice, and later I may decide to take the veil… God grant you the strength not to reply to me – it’s no use extending and increasing our torment…”

I carried out her request. And I disappeared for a long time in the filthiest taverns, taking to drink and sinking lower and lower in every possible way. Then I began, little by little, to set myself to rights – indifferently, hopelessly… Almost two years passed after that Pure Monday…

In 1914, approaching New Year, there was a quiet, sunny evening just like that unforgettable one. I left the house, took a cab and drove to the Kremlin. There I went into the empty Archangel Cathedral and stood for a long time in its gloom without praying, gazing at the feeble glimmering of the old gold of the iconostasis and the tombstones of the Muscovite Tsars – I stood as though waiting for something in that special quietness of an empty church, when you are afraid even to sigh in it. Leaving the cathedral, I ordered the cab man to go to Ordynka, and I rode at a walk, as then, down dark lanes among gardens, with the windows lit beneath the trees, drove down Griboyedov Lane – and kept on crying and crying…

On Ordynka I stopped the cab man by the gates of the Convent of Sts Martha and Mary: there in the courtyard were the black shapes of carriages, the open doors of the small, illuminated church could be seen, and from the doors carried the mournful and emotional singing of a female choir. For some reason I felt a desire to go inside without fail. The yardman by the gates blocked my path, begging gently, imploringly:

“You can’t, sir, you can’t!”

“What do you mean, I can’t? I can’t go into the church?”

“You can, sir, of course you can – only for God’s sake, I beg you, don’t go, Grand Duchess Yel’zavet’ Fyod’rovna and Grand Duke ’Mitry Pa’lych are there now…”

I thrust a rouble upon him – he heaved a grief-stricken sigh and let me pass. But no sooner had I entered the courtyard than icons and banners appeared, as they were carried out from the church, and behind them the Grand Duchess in something long and white, thin-faced, wearing a white veil with an embroidered gold cross on the forehead, tall, walking slowly, devoutly, with eyes lowered, with a large candle in her hand, and behind her stretched just as white a line of singing nuns or nurses, with the lights of candles by their faces – I do not know who they were or where they were going. For some reason I looked at them very carefully. And then one of those walking in the middle suddenly raised her head, which was covered with a white veil, and, blocking out the candle with her hand, she directed the gaze of her dark eyes into the darkness, as though straight at me… What could she have seen in the darkness, how could she have sensed my presence? I turned away and quietly went out of the gates.

12th May 1944