A Beauty

An official from the provincial revenue department, a widower, elderly, married a young thing, a beauty, the daughter of the local military commander. He was taciturn and modest, while she was selfassured. He was thin, tall, of consumptive build, wore glasses the colour of iodine, spoke rather hoarsely and if he wanted to say anything a little louder would break into a falsetto. And she was short, splendidly and strongly built, always well dressed, very attentive and organized around the house, and had a sharpness in the gaze of her wonderful blue eyes. He seemed just as uninteresting in all respects as a multitude of provincial officials, but had been wed to a beauty, in his first marriage too – and everyone simply spread their hands: why and wherefore did such women marry him?

And so the second beauty calmly came to hate his seven-year-old boy by the first one, and pretended not to notice him at all. Then the father too, out of fear of her, also pretended that he did not have, and never had had a son. And the boy, by nature lively and affectionate, became frightened of saying a word in their presence, and then hid himself away completely, made himself as though non-existent in the house.

Immediately after the wedding he was moved out of his father’s bedroom to sleep on a little couch in the drawing room, a small room next to the dining room, furnished with blue velvet furniture. But his sleep was restless, and every night he knocked his sheet and blanket off onto the floor, and soon the beauty said to the maid:

“It’s scandalous, he’ll wear out all the velvet on the couch. Make his bed up on the floor, Nastya, on that little mattress I ordered you to hide away in the late mistress’s big trunk in the corridor.”

And the boy, in his utter solitude in all the world, began leading a completely independent life, completely isolated from the whole house – inaudible, inconspicuous, identical from day to day, he sits meekly in a corner of the drawing room, draws little houses on a slate or reads in a halting whisper always one and the same little picture book, bought still in his late mother’s time, builds a railway out of matchboxes, looks out of the windows… He sleeps on the floor between the couch and a potted palm. He makes up his little bed himself in the evening, and diligently clears it away, rolls it up himself in the morning, and carries it off into the corridor to his mother’s trunk. All the rest of his bits of belongings are hidden away there too.

28th September 1940

The Simpleton

The deacon’s son, a seminarist who had come to the village to stay with his parents for the holidays, was woken up one dark hot night by cruel bodily arousal and, lying there for a while, he inflamed himself still more with his imagination: in the afternoon, before dinner, he had been spying from a willow bush on the shore above a creek in the river on the lasses who had come there from work and, throwing their petticoats over their heads from their sweaty white bodies, with noise and guffawing, tilting their faces up and bending their backs, had flung themselves into the hotly gleaming water; then, unable to control himself, he got up, stole in the darkness through the lobby into the kitchen, where it was black and hot as in a heated stove, and groped, stretching his arms forwards, for the plank bed on which slept the cook, a beggarly lass without kith or kin and reputed to be a simpleton, and she, in terror, did not even cry out. After that he slept with her the whole summer and fathered a boy, who duly began growing up with his mother in the kitchen. The deacon, the deacon’s wife, the priest himself and the whole of his house, the whole of the shopkeeper’s family and the village constable and his wife, they all knew whose this boy was – and the seminarist, coming to stay for the holidays, could not see him for bad-tempered shame over his own past: he had slept with the simpleton!

When he graduated – “brilliantly!” as the deacon told everyone – and again came to stay with his parents for the summer before entering the academy, they invited guests for tea on the very first holy day to show off before them their pride in the future academy student. The guests also spoke of his brilliant future, drank tea, ate various jams, and in the midst of their animated conversation the happy deacon wound up a gramophone that began to hiss and then shout loudly. All had fallen silent and started listening with smiles of pleasure to the rousing sounds of ‘Along the Roadway’, when suddenly into the room, beginning to dance and stamp, clumsily and out of time, there flew the cook’s boy, to whom his mother, thinking to touch everyone with him, had stupidly whispered: “Run and have a dance, little one.” The unexpectedness bewildered everyone, but the deacon’s son, turning crimson, threw himself upon him like a tiger and flung him out of the room with such force that the boy rolled into the entrance hall like a peg top.

The next day, at his demand, the deacon and the deacon’s wife gave the cook the sack. They were kind and compassionate people and had grown very accustomed to her, had grown to love her for her meekness and obedience, and they asked their son in all sorts of ways to be charitable. But he remained adamant, and they did not dare disobey him. Towards evening, quietly crying and holding in one hand her bundle and in the other the little hand of the boy, the cook left the yard.

All summer after that she went around the villages and hamlets with him, begging for alms. She wore out her clothes, grew shabby, was baked in the wind and sun, became nothing but skin and bone, but was tireless. She walked bare-footed, with a sackcloth bag over her shoulder, propping herself up with a tall stick, and in the villages and hamlets bowed silently before every hut. The boy walked behind her with a bag over his little shoulder too, wearing her old shoes, battered and hardened like the down-at-heel things that lie about somewhere in a gully.

He was ugly. The crown of his head was large, flat and covered with the red hair of a boar, his little nose was squashed flat and had wide nostrils, his eyes were nut brown and very shiny. But when he smiled he was very sweet.

28th September 1940

Antigone

In June, a student set off from his mother’s estate for his uncle and aunt’s – he needed to pay them a visit, find out how they were, about the health of his uncle, a general who had lost the use of his legs. The student performed this service every summer and was travelling now with submissive serenity, unhurriedly reading a new book by Averchenko in a second-class carriage, with a young, rounded thigh set on the edge of the couch, absent-mindedly watching through the window as the telegraph poles dipped and rose with their white porcelain cups in the shape of lilies-of-the-valley. He looked like a young officer – only his white peaked cap with a blue band was a student’s, everything else was to the military model: a white tunic, greenish breeches, boots with patent-leather tops, a cigarette case with an orange lighting wick.

His uncle and aunt were rich. When he came home from Moscow, a heavy tarantass was sent out to the station for him, a pair of draught horses and not a coachman but a workman. But at his uncle’s station he always stepped for a certain time into a completely different life, into the pleasure of great prosperity, he began feeling handsome, jaunty, affected. So it was now too. With involuntary foppishness he got into a light carriage on rubber wheels with three lively dark-bay horses in harness, driven by a young coachman in a blue, sleeveless poddyovka and a yellow silk shirt.

A quarter of an hour later, with a sprinkling of little bells softly playing and its tyres hissing across the sand around the flower bed, the troika flew into the round yard of an extensive country estate towards the perron of a spacious new house of two storeys. Onto the perron to take his things emerged a strapping servant wearing half-whiskers, a red-and-black striped waistcoat and gaiters. The student took an agile and improbably big leap out of the carriage: smiling and rocking as she walked, on the threshold of the vestibule there appeared his aunt – a loose, shapeless, tussore day coat on a big, flaccid body, a large, drooping face, a nose like an anchor and yellow bags beneath brown eyes. She kissed him on the cheeks in a familiar way, with feigned joy he pressed his lips against her soft, dark hand, quickly thinking: lying like this for three whole days, and not knowing what to do with myself in my free time! Feignedly and hurriedly replying to her feignedly solicitous questions about his mother, he followed her into the large vestibule, glanced with cheerful hatred at the somewhat bent, stuffed brown bear with gleaming glass eyes standing clumsily at full height by the entrance to the wide staircase to the upper floor and obligingly holding a bronze dish for calling cards in its sharp-clawed front paws, and suddenly even came to a halt in gratifying surprise: the wheelchair with the plump, pale, blue-eyed General, was being wheeled steadily towards him by a tall, stately beauty with big grey eyes in a grey gingham dress, a white pinafore and a white headscarf, all aglow with youth, strength, cleanliness, the lustre of her well-groomed hands and the matt whiteness of her face. Kissing his uncle’s hand, he managed to glance at the extraordinary elegance of her dress and feet. The General joked:

“And this is my Antigone, my good guide, although I’m not even blind, like Oedipus was, and especially not to good-looking women. Make one another’s acquaintance, youngsters.”

She smiled faintly and replied with only a bow to the bow of the student.

The strapping servant with the half-whiskers and the red waistcoat led him past the bear and up the staircase with its gleaming dark-yellow wood and a red runner down the middle and along a similar corridor, took him into a large bedroom with a marble bathroom alongside – on this occasion a different one to before, and with windows looking onto the park, and not into the yard. But he walked without seeing anything. Spinning around in his head there was still the cheerful nonsense with which he had driven onto the estate – “my uncle, the most honest fellow” – but already there was something else too: there’s a woman for you!

Humming, he began to shave, wash and get changed, and he put on trousers with straps under the feet, thinking:

“Such women really do exist! And what would you give for the love of such a woman! And how with such beauty can you possibly be pushing old men and women around in wheelchairs!”

And absurd ideas came into his head: to go on and stay here for a month, for two, to enter in secret from everyone into friendship with her, intimacy, to arouse her love, then say: be my wife, I’m all yours and for ever. Mama, Aunt, Uncle, their amazement when I declare to them our love and our decision to unite our lives, their indignation, then persuasion, cries, tears, curses, disinheritance – it all means nothing to me for your sake…

Running down the stairs to his aunt and uncle – their rooms were downstairs – he thought:

“What rubbish does enter my head, though! It stands to reason, you can stay here on some pretext or other… you can start unobtrusively paying court, pretend to be madly in love… But will you achieve anything? And even if you do, what next? How do you finish the story off? Really get married, do you?”

For about an hour he sat with his aunt and uncle in the latter’s huge study, with a huge writing desk, with a huge ottoman, covered with fabrics from Turkestan, with a rug on the wall above with crossed oriental weapons hanging all over it, with inlaid tables for smoking, and with a large photographic portrait in a rosewood frame under a little gold crown on the mantelpiece, on which was the free flourish, made with his own hand: Alexander.

“How glad I am, Uncle and Aunt, to be with you again,” he said towards the end, thinking of the nurse. “And how wonderful it is here at your place! It’ll be a dreadful shame to leave.”

“And who is it driving you out?” replied his uncle. “Where are you hurrying off to? Stay on till you’re sick of it.”

“It goes without saying,” said his aunt absent-mindedly. Sitting and chatting, he was continually expecting her to come in at any moment – a maid would announce that tea was ready in the dining room, and she would come to wheel his uncle through. But tea was served in the study – a table was wheeled in with a silver teapot on a spirit lamp, and his aunt herself poured. Then he kept on hoping she would bring some medicine or other for his uncle… But she simply did not come.

“Well, to hell with her,” he thought, leaving the study, and went into the dining room, where the servants were lowering the blinds on the tall, sunny windows, glanced for some reason to the right, through the doors of the reception hall, where in the late afternoon light the glass cups on the feet of the grand piano were reflected in the parquet, then passed to the left, into the drawing room, beyond which was the divan room; from the drawing room he went out onto the balcony, descended to the brightly multicoloured flower bed, walked around it, and wandered off down a shady avenue lined by tall trees… It was still hot in the sunshine, and there were still two hours left until dinner.

At half-seven a gong began howling in the vestibule. He was the first to enter the dining room, with its festively glittering chandelier, where beside a table by the wall there already stood a fat, clean-shaven cook all in starched white, a lean-cheeked footman in a frock coat and white, knitted gloves, and a little maid, delicate in a French way. A minute later, his aunt came in unsteadily like a milky-grey queen, in a straw-colored silk dress with cream lace, her ankles swelling above tight silk shoes, and, at long last, her. But after wheeling his uncle up to the table, she immediately, without turning round, glided out – the student only had time to notice a peculiarity of her eyes: they did not blink. His uncle made little signs of the cross over his light-grey, double-breasted general’s jacket, the student and his aunt devoutly crossed themselves standing up, then sat down ceremoniously and opened out their gleaming napkins. Washed, pale, with combed, wet, straggly hair, his uncle displayed his hopeless illness particularly obviously, but he spoke and ate a lot and with gusto, and shrugged his shoulders, talking about the war – it was the time of the Russo-Japanese War: what the devil had we started it for! The footman waited with insulting apathy, the maid, assisting him, minced around on her elegant little feet, the cook served the dishes with the pomposity of a statue. They ate burbot soup, hot as fire, rare roast beef, new potatoes sprinkled with dill. They drank the white and red wines of Prince Golitsyn, the uncle’s old friend. The student talked, replied, gave his agreement with cheerful smiles, but like a parrot, and with the nonsense with which he had got changed a little while before in his head, thinking: and where is she having dinner, surely not with the servants? And he waited for the moment when she would come again, take his uncle away, and then meet with him somewhere, and he would at least exchange a few words with her. But she came, pushed the wheelchair away, and again disappeared somewhere.

In the night, the nightingales sang cautiously and assiduously in the park, into the open windows of the bedroom came the freshness of the air, the dew and the watered flowers in the flower beds, and the bedclothes of Dutch linen were cooling. The student lay for a while in the darkness and had already decided to turn his face to the wall and go to sleep, but suddenly he lifted his head and half-rose: while getting undressed, he had seen a small door in the wall by the head of the bed, had turned the key in it out of curiosity, had found behind it a second door and had tried it, but it had proved to be locked from the other side – now someone was walking about softly behind those doors, was doing something mysterious – and he held his breath, slipped off the bed, opened the first door, listened intently: something made a quiet ringing noise on the floor behind the second door… He turned cold: could it really be her room? He pressed up against the keyhole – fortunately there was no key in it – and saw light, the edge of a woman’s dressing table, then something white which suddenly rose and covered everything up… There was no doubt that it was her room – who ever else’s? They wouldn’t put the maid here, and Maria Ilyinishna, his aunt’s old maidservant, slept downstairs next to his aunt’s bedroom. And it was as though he were immediately taken ill with her nocturnal proximity, here, behind the wall, and her inaccessibility. He did not sleep for a long time, woke up late and immediately sensed again, mentally pictured, imagined to himself her transparent nightdress, bare feet in slippers…

“This very day would be the time to leave!” he thought, lighting a cigarette.

In the morning they all had coffee in their own rooms. He drank, sitting in his uncle’s loose-fitting nightshirt, in his silk dressing gown, and with the dressing gown thrown open he examined himself with the sorrow of uselessness.

Lunch in the dining room was gloomy and dull. He had lunch only with his aunt, the weather was bad – outside the windows the trees were rocking in the wind, above them the clouds both light and dark were thickening…

“Well, my dear, I’m abandoning you,” said his aunt, getting up and crossing herself. “Entertain yourself as best you can, and do excuse your uncle and me with our illnesses, we sit in our own corners until tea. There’ll probably be rain, otherwise you could have gone out riding…”

He replied brightly:

“Don’t worry, Aunt, I’ll do some reading…”

And he set off for the divan room, where every wall was covered with shelves of books.

On his way there through the drawing room, he thought perhaps he should have a horse saddled after all. But visible through the windows were various rain clouds and an unpleasant metallic azure amidst the purplish storm clouds above the swaying treetops. He went into the divan room, cosy and smelling of cigar smoke – where, beneath shelves of books, leather couches occupied three whole walls – looked at the spines of some wonderfully bound books, and sat down helplessly, sank into a couch. Yes, hellish boredom. If only he could simply see her, chat with her… find out what sort of voice she had, what sort of character, whether she was stupid or, on the contrary, very canny, performing her role modestly until some propitious time. Probably a self-assured bitch who looks after herself very well… And most likely stupid… But how good-looking she is! And to spend the night alongside her again! He got up, opened the glass door onto the stone steps into the park, and heard the trilling of the nightingales through its rustling, but at that point there was such a rush of chill wind through some young trees on the left that he leapt back into the room. The room had gone dark, the wind was flying through those trees, bending their fresh foliage, and the panes of glass in the door and windows began sparkling with the sharp splashes of light rain.

“And it all means nothing to them!” he said loudly, listening to the trilling of the nightingales, now distant, now nearby, which reached him from all directions because of the wind. And at the same moment he heard an even voice:

“Good day.”

He threw a glance and was dumbstruck: she was standing in the room.

“I’ve come to change a book,” she said, cordially impassive. “It’s the only pleasure I have, books,” she added with an easy smile, and went up to the shelves.

He mumbled:

“Good day. I didn’t even hear you come in…”

“Very soft carpets,” she replied and, turning round, now gave him a lengthy look with her unblinking grey eyes.

“And what do you like reading?” he asked, meeting her gaze a little more boldly.

“I’m reading Maupassant now, Octave Mirbeau…”

“Well yes, that’s understandable. All women like Maupassant. Everything in him is about love.”

“But then what can be better than love?”

Her voice was modest, her eyes smiled quietly.

“Love, love!” he said, sighing. “There can be some amazing encounters, but… Your name, nurse?”

“Katerina Nikolayevna. And yours?”

“Call me simply Pavlik,” he replied, becoming ever bolder.

“Do you think I’ll do as an aunt for you as well?”

“I’d give a lot to have such an aunt! For the time being I’m only your unfortunate neighbour.”

“Is it really a misfortune?”

“I could hear you last night. Your room turns out to be next to mine.”

She laughed indifferently:

“And I could hear you. It’s wrong to eavesdrop and spy.”

“How impermissibly beautiful you are!” he said, fixedly examining the variegated grey of her eyes, the matt whiteness of her face and the sheen of the dark hair beneath her white headscarf.

“Do you think so? And do you want not to permit me to be so?”

“Yes. Your hands alone could drive anyone mad…”

And with cheerful audacity he seized her right hand with his left. She, standing with her back to the shelves, glanced over his shoulder into the drawing room and did not remove the hand, gazing at him with a strange grin, as though waiting: well, and what next? He, not releasing her hand, squeezed it tightly, pulling it away downwards, and he gripped her waist with his right arm. She again glanced over his shoulder and threw her head back slightly, as though protecting her face from a kiss, but she pressed her curving torso against him. He, catching his breath with difficulty, stretched towards her half-open lips and moved her towards the couch. She, frowning, began shaking her head, whispering: “No, no, we mustn’t, lying down we’ll see and hear nothing…” and with eyes grown dim she slowly parted her legs… A minute later his face fell onto her shoulder. She stood for a little longer with clenched teeth, then quietly freed herself from him and set off elegantly through the drawing room, saying loudly and indifferently to the noise of the rain:

“Oh, what rain! And all the windows are open upstairs…”

The next morning he woke up in her bed – she had turned onto her back in bed linen rucked up and warmed in the course of the night, with her bare arm thrown up behind her head. He opened his eyes and joyfully met her unblinking gaze, and with the giddiness of a fainting fit sensed the pungent smell of her armpit…

Someone knocked hastily at the door.

“Who’s there?” she asked calmly, without pushing him aside. “Is it you, Maria Ilyinishna?”

“Me, Katerina Nikolayevna.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Let me come in, I’m afraid someone will hear me and they’ll run and frighten the General’s wife…”

When he had slipped out into his room, she unhurriedly turned the key in the lock.

“There’s something wrong with His Excellency, I think an injection needs to be given,” Maria Ilyinishna started whispering as she came in. “The General’s wife is still asleep, thank God, go quickly…”

Maria Ilyinishna’s eyes were already becoming rounded like a snake’s: while speaking, she had suddenly seen a man’s shoes beside the bed – the student had fled barefooted. And she also saw the shoes and Maria Ilyinishna’s eyes.

Before breakfast she went to the General’s wife and said she must leave all of a sudden: started calmly lying that she had received a letter from her father – the news that her brother was seriously wounded in Manchuria – that her father, by reason of his widowerhood, was completely alone in such misfortune…

“Ah, how I understand you!” said the General’s wife, who already knew everything from Maria Ilyinishna. “Well, what’s to be done, go. Only send a telegram to Dr Krivtsov from the station for him to come at once and stay with us until we find another nurse…”

Then she knocked at the student’s door and thrust a note upon him: “All’s lost, I’m leaving. The old woman saw your shoes beside the bed. Remember me kindly.”

At breakfast his aunt was just a little sad, but spoke with him as though nothing were wrong.

“Have you heard? The nurse is going away to her father’s. He’s alone and her brother is terribly wounded…”

“I’ve heard, Aunt. What a misfortune this war is, so much grief everywhere. And what was the matter with Uncle after all?”

“Ah, nothing serious, thank God. He’s a dreadful hypochondriac. It seems to be the heart, but it’s all because of the stomach…”

At three o’clock Antigone was driven away to the station by troika. Without raising his eyes, he said goodbye to her on the perron, as though having run out by chance to order a horse to be saddled. He was ready to cry out from despair. She waved a glove to him from the carriage, sitting no longer in a headscarf, but in a pretty little hat.

2nd October 1940