Part Two

Rusya

After ten o’clock in the evening, the Moscow-Sebastopol fast train stopped at a small station beyond Podolsk where it was not due to make a stop, waiting for something on the second track. On the train, a gentleman and a lady went up to a lowered window of the first-class carriage. A conductor with a red lamp in his dangling hand was crossing the rails, and the lady asked:

“Listen. Why are we standing still?”

The conductor replied that the oncoming express train was late.

The station was dark and sad. Twilight had fallen long before, but in the west, behind the station, beyond the blackening, wooded fields, the long summer Moscow sunset still gave off a deathly glow. Through the window came the damp smell of marshland. Audible from somewhere in the silence was the steady – and as though damp too – screeching of a corncrake.

He leant on the window, she on his shoulder.

“I stayed in this area during the holidays once,” he said. “I was a tutor on a dacha estate about five kilometres from here. It’s a boring area. Scrubland, magpies, mosquitoes and dragonflies. No view anywhere. On the estate you could only admire the horizon from the mezzanine. The house was in the Russian dacha style, of course, and very neglected – the owners were impoverished people – behind the house was some semblance of a garden, beyond the garden not exactly a lake, not exactly a marsh, overgrown with sedge and water lilies, and the inevitable flat-bottomed boat beside the swampy bank.”

“And, of course, a bored dacha maiden whom you took out boating around the marsh.”

“Yes, everything as it’s meant to be. Only the maiden wasn’t at all bored. I took her out boating at night mostly, and it was even poetic, as it turned out. All night in the west the sky’s greenish, pellucid, and there, on the horizon, just like now, there’s something forever smouldering and smouldering… There was only one oar to be found, and that like a spade, and I paddled with it like a savage – first to the right, then to the left. The opposite bank was dark from the scrubland, but beyond it there was this strange half-light all night long. And everywhere unimaginable quietness – only the mosquitoes whining and the dragonflies flying around. I never thought they flew at night – it turned out that for some reason they do. Really terrifying.”

At last there was the noise of the oncoming train, it flew upon them with a clattering and wind, merging into a single golden strip of lighted windows, and rushed on by. The carriage immediately moved off. The carriage attendant entered the compartment, put the light on and began preparing the beds.

“Well, and what was there between you and this maiden? A real romance? You’ve never told me about her for some reason. What was she like?”

“Thin, tall. She wore a yellow cotton sarafan and peasants’ shoes woven from some multicoloured wool on bare feet.”

“In the Russian style as well then?”

“Most of all in the style of poverty, I think. Nothing to put on, hence the sarafan. Apart from that, she was an artist, she studied at the Stroganov School of Painting. And she was like a painting herself, like an icon even. A long, black plait on her back, a swarthy face with little dark moles, a narrow, regular nose, black eyes, black brows… Dry and wiry hair which was slightly curly. With the yellow sarafan and the white muslin sleeves of her blouse, it all stood out very prettily. The ankle bones and the beginning of the foot in the woollen shoes – all wiry, with bones sticking out under the thin, swarthy skin.”

“I know the type. I had a friend like that at college. Probably hysterical.”

“It’s possible. Especially as she resembled her mother facially, and the mother, some sort of princess by birth, with oriental blood, suffered from something like manic depression. She’d emerge only to come to the table. She’d emerge, sit down and say nothing, cough a bit, without raising her eyes, and keep on moving first her knife, then her fork. And if she did suddenly start talking, then it was so unexpected and loud that it gave you a start.”

“And her father?”

“Taciturn and dry as well, tall: a retired military man. Only their boy, whom I was tutoring, was straightforward and nice.”

The carriage attendant left the compartment, said that the beds were ready, and wished us a good night.

“And what was her name?”

“Rusya.”

“What sort of name is that?”

“A very simple one – Marusya.”

“Well, and so were you very much in love with her?”

“Of course, terribly, so it seemed.”

“And she?”

He paused and replied drily:

“It probably seemed so to her as well. But let’s go to bed. I’m terribly tired after today.”

“Very nice! Just got me interested for nothing. Well, tell me, if only in two words, what brought your romance to an end and how.”

“Nothing at all. I left, and that was the end of the matter.”

“Why ever didn’t you marry her?”

“I evidently had a premonition that I’d meet you.”

“No, seriously.”

“Well, because I shot myself, and she stabbed herself with a dagger…”

And after washing and cleaning their teeth, they shut themselves into the tight space formed by the compartment, undressed, and with the delight of travellers lay down beneath the fresh, shiny linen of the sheets, onto similar pillows that kept slipping from the slightly raised bedhead.

The bluish lilac peephole above the door gazed quietly into the darkness. She soon dropped off, but he did not sleep, he lay smoking, and in his thoughts looked back at that summer…

She also had a lot of little dark moles on her body – that peculiarity was charming. Because she went about in soft footwear, without heels, her entire body undulated beneath the yellow sarafan. The sarafan was loose, light, and her long, girlish body was so free in it. One day she got her feet wet in the rain, ran into the drawing room from the garden, and he rushed to take off her shoes and kiss her wet, narrow soles – in the whole of his life there had not been such happiness. The fresh, fragrant rain rattled ever faster and heavier beyond the doors, open onto the balcony, in the darkened house everyone was sleeping after dinner – and how dreadfully he and she were frightened by some black and metallic-green-tinted cockerel, wearing a big, fiery crown, which ran in suddenly from the garden too, with a tapping of talons across the floor, at that most ardent of moments when they had forgotten any kind of caution. Seeing how they leapt up from the couch, it ran back into the rain, hastily and bending down, as though out of tactfulness, with its gleaming tail lowered…

At first she kept on scrutinizing him; whenever he began talking to her she blushed heavily and replied with sarcastic mutterings; at table she often annoyed him, addressing her father loudly:

“Don’t give him food to no purpose, Papa, he doesn’t like fruit dumplings. And he doesn’t like kvas soup either, nor does he like noodles, and he despises yoghurt, and hates curd cheese.”

In the mornings he was busy with the boy, she with housekeeping – the whole house was down to her. They had dinner at one, and after dinner she would go off to her room on the mezzanine or, if there was no rain, into the garden, where her easel stood under a birch tree, and, waving away the mosquitoes, she would paint from nature. Later she began going out onto the balcony, where he sat in a crooked cane armchair with a book after dinner, standing with her hands behind her back and casting glances at him with an indefinite grin:

“Might one learn what subtleties you’re so good as to be studying?”

“The history of the French Revolution.”

“Oh my God! I didn’t even know we had a revolutionary in the house!”

“But why ever have you given up your painting?”

“I’ll be giving it up completely at any time. I’ve become convinced of my lack of talent.”

“Show me something of your paintings.”

“And do you think you understand anything about painting?”

“You’re terribly proud.”

“I do have that fault…”

Finally one day she proposed going boating on the lake to him, and suddenly said decisively:

“The rainy season in our tropical parts seems to have ended. Let’s enjoy ourselves. True, our dugout’s quite rotten and the bottom has holes in it, but Petya and I have stopped up all the holes with sedge…”

The day was hot, it was sultry, the grasses on the bank, speckled with little yellow buttercup flowers had been stiflingly heated up by the moist warmth, and low above them circled countless pale-green butterflies.

He had adopted her constant mocking tone for himself and, approaching the boat, said:

“At long last you’ve deigned to speak to me!”

“At long last you’ve collected your thoughts and answered me!” she replied briskly, and jumped onto the bow of the boat, scaring away the frogs, which plopped into the water from all directions, but suddenly she gave a wild shriek and caught her sarafan right up to her knees, stamping her feet:

“A grass snake! A grass snake!”

He glimpsed the gleaming swarthiness of her bare legs, grabbed the oar from the bow, hit the grass snake wriggling along the bottom of the boat with it and, hooking the snake up, threw it far away into the water.

She was pale with an Indian sort of pallor, the moles on her face had become darker, the blackness of her hair and eyes seemingly even blacker. She drew breath in relief:

“Oh, how disgusting! Not for nothing is a snake in the grass named after the grass snake. We have them everywhere here, in the garden and under the house… And Petya, just imagine, picks them up in his hands!”

For the first time she had begun speaking to him unaffectedly, and for the first time they glanced directly into one another’s eyes.

“But what a good fellow you are! What a good whack you gave it!”

She had recovered herself completely, she smiled and, running back from the bow to the stern, sat down cheerfully. She had struck him with her beauty in her fright, and now he thought with tenderness: but she’s still quite a little girl! Yet putting on an indifferent air, he took a preoccupied step across into the boat and, leaning the oar against the jelly-like lakebed, turned its bow forwards and pulled it across the tangled thicket of underwater weeds towards the green brushes of sedge and the flowering water lilies which covered everything ahead with an unbroken layer of their thick, round foliage, brought the boat out into the water and sat down on the thwart in the middle, paddling to the right and to the left.

“Nice, isn’t it?” she cried.

“Very!” he replied, taking off his cap, and turned round towards her: “Be so kind as to drop this down beside you, or else I’ll knock it off into this here tub, which, forgive me, does after all leak, and is full of leeches.”

She put the cap on her knees.

“Oh, don’t worry, drop it down anywhere.”

She pressed the cap to her breast:

“No, I’m going to take care of it!”

Again his heart stirred tenderly, but again he turned away and began intensifying his thrusting of the oar into the water that shone between the sedge and the water lilies. Mosquitoes stuck to his face and hands, the warm silver of everything all around was dazzling: the sultry air, the undulating sunlight, the curly whiteness of the clouds shining softly in the sky and in the clear patches of water between islands of sedge and water lilies; it was so shallow everywhere that the lakebed with its underwater weeds was visible, but somehow that did not preclude that bottomless depth into which the reflected sky and clouds receded. Suddenly she shrieked again – and the boat toppled sideways: she had put her hand into the water from the stern and, catching a water-lily stalk, had jerked it towards her so hard that she had tipped over along with the boat – he was scarcely in time to leap up and catch her by the armpits. She began roaring with laughter and, falling onto her back in the stern, she splashed water right into his eyes with her wet hand. Then he grabbed her again and, without understanding what he was doing, kissed her laughing lips. She quickly clasped her arms around his neck and kissed him clumsily on the cheek…

From then on they began boating at night. The next day she called him out into the garden after dinner and asked:

“Do you love me?”

He replied ardently, remembering the kisses of the day before in the boat:

“Since the first day we met!”

“Me too,” she said. “No, at first I hated you – I didn’t think you noticed me at all. But all that’s already in the past, thank God! This evening, as soon as everyone goes to bed, go there again and wait for me. Only leave the house as cautiously as possible – Mama watches my every step, she’s madly jealous.”

In the night she came to the shore with a plaid on her arm. In joy he greeted her confusedly, only asking:

“And why the plaid?”

“How silly you are! We’ll be cold. Well, get in quickly and paddle to the other bank…”

They were silent all the way. When they floated up to the wood on the other side, she said:

“There we are. Now come here to me. Where’s the plaid? Ah, it’s underneath me. Cover me up, I’m cold, and sit down. That’s right… No, wait, yesterday we kissed awkwardly somehow, now I’ll kiss you myself to begin with, only gently, gently. And you put your arms around me… everywhere…”

She had only a petticoat on under the sarafan. Tenderly, scarcely touching, she kissed the edges of his lips. He, with his head in a spin, threw her onto the stern. She embraced him frenziedly…

After lying for a while in exhaustion, she raised herself a little and, with a smile of happy tiredness and pain that had not yet abated, said:

“Now we’re husband and wife. Mama says she won’t survive my getting married, but I don’t want to think about that for the moment… You know, I want to bathe, I’m terribly fond of bathing at night…”

She pulled her clothes off over her head, the whole of her long body showed up white in the twilight, and she began tying a braid around her head, lifting her arms and showing her dark armpits and her raised breasts, unashamed of her nakedness and the little dark prominence below her belly. When she had finished, she quickly kissed him, leapt to her feet, fell flat into the water with her head tossed back and began thrashing noisily with her legs.

Afterwards, hurrying, he helped her to dress and wrap herself up in the plaid. In the twilight her black eyes and black hair, tied up in a braid, were fabulously visible. He did not dare touch her any more, he only kissed her hands and stayed silent out of unendurable happiness. All the time it seemed that there was someone there in the darkness of the wood on the shore, which glimmered in places with glow-worms, someone standing and listening. At times something would give out a cautious rustling there. She would raise her head:

“Hold on, what’s that?”

“Don’t be afraid, it’s probably a frog crawling out onto the bank. Or a hedgehog in the wood…”

“And what if it’s a wild goat?”

“What wild goat’s that?”

“I don’t know. But just think: some wild goat comes out of the wood, stands and looks… I feel so good, I feel like talking dreadful nonsense!”

And again he would press her hands to his lips, sometimes he would kiss her cold breast like something sacred. What a completely new creature she had become for him! And the greenish half-light hung beyond the blackness of the low wood and did not go out, it was weakly reflected in the flat whiteness of the water in the distance, and the dewy plants on the shore had a strong smell like celery, while mysteriously, pleadingly, the invisible mosquitoes whined and terrible, sleepless dragonflies flew, flew with a quiet crackling above the boat and further off, above that nocturnally shining water. And all the time, somewhere something was rustling, crawling, making its way along…

A week later, stunned by the horror of the utterly sudden parting, he was disgracefully, shamefully expelled from the house.

One day after dinner they were sitting in the drawing room with their heads touching, and looking at the pictures in old editions of The Cornfield.

“You haven’t stopped loving me yet?” he asked quietly, pretending to be looking attentively.

“Silly. Terribly silly!” she whispered.

Suddenly, softly running footsteps could be heard – and on the threshold in a tattered black silk dressing gown and worn morocco slippers stood her crazy mother. Her black eyes were gleaming tragically. She ran in, as though onto a stage, and cried:

“I understand everything! I sensed it, I watched! Scoundrel, she shall not be yours!”

And throwing up her arm in its long sleeve, she fired a deafening shot from the ancient pistol with which Petya, loading it just with powder, scared the sparrows. In the smoke he rushed towards her, grabbed her tenacious arm. She broke free, struck him on the forehead with the pistol, cutting his brow open and drawing blood, flung it at him and, hearing people running through the house in response to the shouting and the shot, began crying out even more theatrically with foam on her blue-grey lips:

“Only over my dead body will she take the step to you! If she runs away with you, that same day I shall hang myself, throw myself from the roof! Scoundrel, out of my house! Maria Viktorovna, choose: your mother or him!”

She whispered:

“You, you, Mama…”

He came to, opened his eyes – still just as unwavering, enigmatic, funereal, the bluish-lilac peephole above the door looked at him from the black darkness, and still with the same unwavering, onward-straining speed, springing and rocking, the carriage tore on. That sad halt had already been left far, far behind. And all that there had been already fully twenty years ago – coppices, magpies, marshes, water lilies, grass snakes, cranes… Yes, there had been cranes as well, hadn’t there – how on earth had he forgotten about them! Everything had been strange in that amazing summer, strange too the pair of cranes of some sort which from time to time had flown in from somewhere to the shore of the marsh, and the fact that they had allowed just her alone near them and, arching their slender, long necks, with very stern but gracious curiosity, had looked at her from above when she, having run up to them softly and lightly in her multicoloured woollen shoes, had suddenly squatted down in front of them, spreading out her yellow sarafan on the moist and warm greenery of the shore, and peeped with childish fervour into their beautiful and menacing black pupils, tightly gripped by a ring of dark-grey iris. He had looked at her and at them from a distance through binoculars, and seen distinctly their small, shiny heads – even their bony nostrils, the slits of their strong, large beaks, which they used to kill grass snakes with a single blow. Their stumpy bodies with the fluffy bunches of their tails had been tightly covered with steel-grey plumage, the scaly canes of their legs disproportionately long and slender – those of one completely black, of the other greenish. Sometimes they had both stood on one leg for hours at a time in incomprehensible immobility, sometimes quite out of the blue they had jumped up and down, opening wide their enormous wings; or otherwise they had strolled about grandly, stepping out slowly, steadily, lifting their feet, squeezing their three talons into a little ball and putting them down flat, spreading the talons – like a predator’s – apart, and all the time nodding their little heads… Though when she was running up to them, he had no longer been thinking of anything or seeing anything – he had seen only her outspread sarafan, and shaken with morbid languor at the thought of, beneath it, her swarthy body and the dark moles upon it. And on that their final day, on that their final time sitting together on the couch in the drawing room, over the old volume of The Cornfield, she had held his cap in her hands as well, pressed it to her breast, like that time in the boat, and had said, flashing her joyful black-mirrored eyes into his:

“I love you so much now, there’s nothing dearer to me than even this smell here inside the cap, the smell of your head and your disgusting eau de Cologne!”

* * *

Beyond Kursk, in the restaurant car, when he was drinking coffee and brandy after lunch, his wife said to him:

“Why is it you’re drinking so much? I believe that’s your fifth glass already. Are you still pining, remembering your dacha maiden with the bony feet?”

“Pining, pining,” he replied with an unpleasant grin. “The dacha maiden… Amata nobis quantum amabitur nulla!”

“Is that Latin? What does it mean?”

“You don’t need to know that.”

“How rude you are,” she said with an offhand sigh, and started looking out of the sunny window.

27th September 1940