A Late Hour

Ah, what a long time it was since I’d been there, I said to myself. Not since I was nineteen. I had once lived in Russia, felt it to be mine, had complete freedom to travel anywhere I wanted, and it was no great trouble to go some three hundred kilometres. Yet I kept on not going, kept putting it off. And the years came and went, the decades. But now it’s no longer possible to put it off any more: either now or never. The one final opportunity must be taken, for the hour is late and nobody will come upon me.

And I set off across the bridge over the river, seeing everything all around a long way off in the moonlight of the July night.

The bridge was so familiar, as before, it was as though I’d seen it yesterday: crudely ancient, humped and as if not even of stone but sort of petrified by time into eternal indestructibility – as a schoolboy I thought it had already been there in Baty’s time. The town’s antiquity, however, is spoken of only by a few traces of the town walls on the precipice below the cathedral and by this bridge. Everything else is simply old, provincial, no more. One thing was strange, one thing indicated that something had, after all, changed in the world since the time when I had been a boy, a youth: previously the river had not been navigable, but now it had probably been deepened, cleared out; the moon was to my left, quite a long way above the river, and in its uneven light, and in the flickering, trembling gleam of the water was the whiteness of a paddle steamer which seemed empty – so silent was it – although all its portholes were lit up, looking like open but sleeping golden eyes, and were all reflected in the water as rippling gold columns: it was as if the steamer were actually standing on them. It had been like this in Yaroslavl, and in the Suez Canal, and on the Nile. In Paris the nights are damp, dark, there is a pinkish, hazy glow in the impenetrable sky. The Seine flows under the bridges like black pitch, but under them there also hang the rippling columns of reflections from the lamps on the bridges, only they are three-coloured: white, blue and red – Russian national flags. Here there are no lamps on the bridge, and it is dry and dusty. But up ahead on the hillside is the darkness of the town’s gardens, and protruding above the gardens is the fire-observation tower. My God, what ineffable happiness it was! It was during a fire at night that I kissed your hand for the first time, and you gave mine a squeeze in reply – I shall never forget that secret accord. The whole street was black with people in ominous, abnormal illumination. I was visiting your house when the alarm was suddenly sounded, and everyone rushed to the windows and then out of the gate. The burning was a long way off, beyond the river, but it was terribly fervent, greedy, urgent. Thick clouds of smoke were belching out there like a crimson-black fleece, bursting out from them on high were red calico sheets of flame, and near to us, trembling, they were reflected in copper in the cupola of the Archangel Michael. And in the crush, in the crowd, amidst the alarmed, now compassionate, now joyous voices of the common people, who were flocking together from everywhere and not taking their widened eyes off the fire, I smelt the scent of your maidenly hair, neck, gingham dress – then suddenly made up my mind and, turning quite cold, took your hand…

On the other side of the bridge I climbed up the hillside and went to the town along the paved road.

There was not a solitary light anywhere in the town, not a single living soul. All was mute and spacious, tranquil and sad – with the sadness of night in the Russian steppe, of a sleeping town in the steppe. The gardens alone had their foliage quivering, scarcely audibly, cautiously, from the even flow of the light July wind, wafting in from somewhere in the fields, blowing on me gently, giving me a feeling of youth and lightness. I was moving, and the large moon was moving too, its mirror-like disc rolling and visible in the blackness of branches; the wide streets lay in shadow – only in the houses on the right, to which the shadow did not reach, were the white walls lit up and was a funereal lustre twinkling on the black window panes – but I walked in the shade, treading along the dappled pavement – it was transparently paved with black silk lace. She had an evening dress like that, very smart, long and elegant. It was extraordinarily suited to her slender figure and black, young eyes. She was mysterious in it and insultingly paid me no attention. Where was that? Visiting whom?

My objective was to spend some time on Staraya Street. And I could have got there by another, quicker route. But the reason I turned into a late hour these spacious streets with gardens was that I wanted to take a look at the grammar school. And reaching it, I marvelled again: here too everything had remained as half a century before; the stone boundary wall, the stone yard, the big stone building in the yard – everything just as conventional, boring as it had been before, in my time. I lingered by the gates, wanting to provoke in myself the sorrow, the pity of memories – and couldn’t. Yes, I had first entered these gates as a first-year with close-cropped hair in a nice, new blue cap with silver palms over the peak, and in a new little greatcoat with silver buttons, then as a thin youth in a grey jacket and foppish trousers with straps under the feet – but is that really me?

Staraya Street seemed to me just a little narrower and longer than it had before. Everything else was unchanging, like everywhere. The potholed roadway, not a single little tree, on both sides the white, dusty houses of provincial merchants, the pavements potholed as well, such that it would be better to walk down the middle of the street in the full light of the moon… And the night was almost the same as that one. Only that one had been at the end of August, when the whole town smells of the apples which lie in mountains at the markets, and was so warm that it was a delight to be wearing just a kosovorotka with a Caucasian belt around it… Is it possible to remember that night somewhere up there, as if in the sky?

I could not make up my mind to go as far as your house after all. It too had probably not changed, but all the more terrible to see it. Some new people, strangers, live in it now. Your father, your mother, your brother – they all outlived young you, but also died when their time came. And every one of mine has died too, and not only my relatives, but also many, many with whom I began life in friendship or comradeship; was it so long ago that they too began, certain in their hearts there would be simply no end to it, but everything has begun, elapsed and come to an end before my eyes – so quickly, and before my eyes! And I sat down on a bollard beside some merchant’s house, impregnable behind its locks and gates, and started thinking about what she was like in those distant times of ours: simply dressed dark hair, a clear gaze, the light tan of a youthful face, a light summer dress, beneath which were the chastity, strength and freedom of a young body… That was the start of our love, a time of happiness as yet unclouded by anything, of intimacy, trustfulness, enraptured tenderness, joy…

There is something utterly special about the warm and bright nights of Russian provincial towns at the end of summer. What peace, what well-being! An old man wanders through the cheerful nocturnal town with a watchman’s rattle, but solely for his own pleasure: there’s no need to keep watch, sleep peacefully, good people; you are watched over by God’s goodwill, by this lofty, radiant sky, at which the old man casts the odd carefree glance as he wanders down the roadway, heated up in the course of the day, just occasionally, for fun, letting go a dancing shake of the rattle. And it was on such a night, at that late hour when just he alone in the town was not asleep, you were waiting for me in your family’s garden, already a little dried up towards autumn, and I slipped into it by stealth: I quietly opened the gate, unlocked in advance by you, quietly and quickly ran through the yard and, behind the shed in the depths of the yard, entered the dappled twilight of the garden where, in the distance, on the bench under the apple trees, the whiteness of your dress was faintly visible, and approaching quickly, with joyous fright, I met the lustre of your waiting eyes.

And we sat, sat in a sort of bewilderment of happiness. With one hand I embraced you, sensing the beating of your heart, in the other I held your hand, feeling through it the whole of you. And it was already so late that even the rattle was not to be heard – the old man had laid down on a bench somewhere and dozed off with his pipe in his teeth, warming himself in the light of the moon. When I looked to the right, I could see the moon shining high and sinless above the yard, and the roof of the house gleaming with piscine lustre. When I looked to the left, I saw a path, overgrown with dry grasses, disappearing under more apple trees, and beyond them, peeping out low from behind some other garden, a solitary green star, glimmering impassively, and at the same time expectantly, and soundlessly saying something. But both the yard and the star I saw only in glimpses – there was one thing in the world: the delicate twilight and the radiant twinkling in the twilight of your eyes.

And then you accompanied me as far as the gate, and I said:

“If there is a future life and we meet in it, I shall kneel down there and kiss your feet for all that you gave me on earth.”

I went out into the middle of the bright street and set off for my town-house lodgings. Turning back, I saw there was still whiteness in the gateway.

Now, rising from the bollard, I set off back by the same route by which I had come. No, I had, apart from Staraya Street, another objective too, one which I was afraid to acknowledge to myself, but the fulfilment of which was, I knew, unavoidable. And I set off – to take a look and leave, this time for ever.

The road was again familiar. Always straight ahead, then to the left, through the market, and from the market – along Monastyrskaya – towards the exit from town.

The market is like another town within the town. Very strong-smelling rows of stalls. In the refreshments row, under awnings above long tables and benches, it is gloomy. In the hardware row, on a chain over the middle of the passage hangs an icon of a big-eyed Saviour in a rusty setting. In the flour row in the mornings there was always a whole flock of pigeons running about and pecking along the roadway. You’re on your way to school – what a lot of them! And all fat, with iridescent craws – they peck and run, waggling their tails in a feminine way, swinging from side to side, twitching their heads monotonously, not seeming to notice you: they fly up, their wings whistling, only when you almost step on one of them. And here in the night-time large, dark rats, foul and ugly, rushed around quickly, preoccupied.

Monastyrskaya Street juts out into the fields, and is then a road: for some, out of town towards home, to the village, for others – to the town of the dead. In Paris, house number such-and-such in such-and-such a street is marked out from all other houses for two days by the pestilential stage properties of the porch, of its coal-black and silver frame, for two days a sheet of paper in a coal-black border lies in the porch on the coal-black shroud of a little table – polite visitors sign their names on it as a mark of sympathy; then, at a certain final time, by the porch stops a huge chariot with a coal-black canopy, the wood of which is black, resinous, like a plague coffin, the rounded cut-outs of the skirts of the canopy bear witness to the heavens with large white stars, while the corners of the top are crowned with curly, coal-black plumes – the feathers of an ostrich from the underworld; harnessed to the chariot are strapping monsters in coal-black horned horse cloths with white-ringed eye sockets; on the interminably high coach box sits an old drunkard waiting for the bearing-out, symbolically dressed up too in a theatrical burial uniform and a similar three-cornered hat, probably forever smirking inwardly at those solemn words: “Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis.” Here everything is different. A breeze blows down Monastyrskaya from the fields, and the open coffin is carried into it on towels, while the rice-coloured face with a vivid ribbon on the forehead above the closed, bulging eyes rocks from side to side. She too was carried thus.

At the exit, to the left of the highway, is a monastery from the times of Alexei Mikhailovich, fortress gates, always closed, and fortress walls, from behind which gleam the gilded turnips of the cathedral. Further on, quite out in the fields, is a very extensive square of more walls, but low ones: confined within them is an entire grove of trees broken up by long, intersecting prospects, down the sides of which, beneath old elms, limes and birches, all is sown with diverse crosses and memorials. Here the gates were open wide, and I saw the main prospect, regular, endless. I tentatively took off my hat and entered. How late and how mute! The moon was already low behind the trees, but all around was still clearly visible as far as the eye could see. The entire expanse of this grove of dead men, its crosses and memorials, was decorated with dappled patterns in the transparent shade. The wind had died down towards the hour before dawn – the light and dark patches that made everything under the trees dappled were sleeping. In a distant part of the grove, from behind the graveyard church, there was a sudden glimpse of something, and it rushed at me in a dark ball at a furious pace – beside myself, I staggered aside, my entire head immediately turned to ice and tightened up, my heart gave a leap and froze. What was it? It rushed by and disappeared. But still my heart remained standing still in my breast. And thus, with my heart stopped, carrying it within me like a burdensome chalice, I moved on. I knew where I had to go, I kept walking straight ahead down the prospect – and at its very end, just a few paces from the rear wall, I stopped: before me, in a level spot, among dry grasses, there lay in solitude an elongated and quite narrow stone, its head towards the wall. And from behind the wall, like a wondrous gem, gazed a low, green star, radiant, like that previous one, but mute and motionless.

19th October 1938