An Emerald

The nocturnal dark-blue blackness of the sky, covered in quietly floating clouds, everywhere white, but beside the high moon pale blue. If you look closely, it isn’t the clouds floating, it’s the moon, and near it, together with it, a star’s golden tear is shed: the moon glides away into the heights that have no end, and carries the star away with it, ever higher and higher.

She is sitting sideways on the ledge of a wide open window and, with her head leaning out, is looking up – her head is spinning a little from the movement of the sky. He is standing at her knees.

“What colour is it? I can’t define it! Can you, Tolya?”

“The colour of what, Kisa?”

“Don’t call me that, I’ve told you a thousand times already…”

“I obey, Ksenya Alexandrovna, ma’am.”

“I’m talking about that sky between the clouds. What a marvelous colour! Both terrifying and marvellous. Now that is truly heavenly, there aren’t any like that on earth. A sort of emerald.”

“Since it’s in the heavens, of course it’s heavenly. Only why an emerald? And what’s an emerald? I’ve never seen one in my life. You simply like the word.”

“Yes. Well, I don’t know – maybe not an emerald, but a ruby… Only such a one as is probably only found in paradise. And when you look at it all like this, how can you possibly not believe that there is a paradise, angels, the throne of God…”

“And golden pears on willows…”

“How spoilt you are, Tolya. Maria Sergeyevna’s right in saying that the very worst girl is still better than any young man.”

“Truth itself speaks with her lips, Kisa.”

The dress she is wearing is cotton, speckled, the shoes cheap; her calves and knees are plump, girlish, her little round head with a small braid around it is so sweetly thrown back… He puts one hand on her knee, clasps her shoulders with the other, and half-jokingly kisses her slightly parted lips. She quietly frees herself, removes his hand from her knee.

“What is it? Are we offended?”

She presses the back of her head against the jamb of the window, and he sees that she is crying.

“But what’s the matter?”

“Oh, leave me alone…”

“But what’s happened?”

She whispers:

“Nothing…”

And jumping down from the window ledge, she runs away.

He shrugs his shoulders:

“Stupid to the point of saintliness!”

3rd October 1940

The Visitor

The visitor rang once, twice – it was quiet on the other side of the door, no reply. He pressed the button again, ringing for a long time, insistently, demandingly – heavy running footsteps were heard – and a short wench, sturdy as a fish, all smelling of kitchen fumes, opened up and looked in bewilderment: dull hair, cheap turquoise earrings in thick earlobes, a Finnish face covered in ginger freckles, seemingly oily hands filled with blue-grey blood. The visitor fell upon her quickly, angrily and cheerfully:

“Why on earth don’t you open up? Asleep, were you?”

“No, sir, you can’t hear a thing in the kitchen, the stove’s ever so noisy,” she replied, continuing to gaze at him in confusion: he was thin, swarthy, with big teeth, a coarse black beard and piercing eyes; he had a grey silk-lined overcoat on his arm, and a grey hat tilted back off his forehead.

“We know all about your kitchen! You’ve probably got a fireman boyfriend sitting with you!”

“No, sir…”

“Well, there you are, then, just you watch out!”

As he spoke, he quickly glanced from the entrance hall into the sunlit drawing room, with its rich red velvet armchairs and, between the windows, a portrait of Beethoven with broad cheekbones.

“And who are you?”

“How do you mean?”

“The new cook?”

“Yes, sir…”

“Fekla? Fedosya?”

“No, sir… Sasha.”

“And the master and mistress aren’t at home, then?”

“The master’s at the newspaper and the mistress has gone to Vasilyevsky Island… to that, what’s it called? Sunday school.”

“That’s annoying. Well, never mind, I’ll drop by again tomorrow. So, tell them, say: a frightening dark man came, Adam Adamych. Repeat what I said.”

“Adam Adamych.”

“Correct, my Flemish Eve. Make sure you remember. And for the time being, here’s what…”

He looked around again briskly and threw his coat onto a stand beside a chest:

“Come over here, quickly.”

“Why?”

“You’ll see…”

And in one moment, with his hat on the back of his head, he toppled her onto the chest and threw the hem of her skirt up from her red woollen stockings and plump knees the colour of beetroot.

“Sir! I’ll shout so the whole house can hear!”

“And I’ll strangle you. Be quiet!”

“Sir! For God’s sake… I’m a virgin!”

“That’s no matter. Well, here we go!”

And a minute later he disappeared. Standing by the stove, she cried quietly in rapture, then began sobbing, and ever louder, and she sobbed for a long time until she got the hiccups, right up until lunch, until someone rang for her. It was the mistress, young, wearing a gold pincenez, energetic, sure of herself and quick, who had arrived first. On entering, she immediately asked:

“Has anybody called?”

“Adam Adamych.”

“Did he leave a message?”

“No, ma’am… Said he’d drop by again tomorrow.”

“And why are you all tear-stained?”

“It’s the onions…”

At night in the kitchen, which gleamed with cleanliness, with new paper scallops along the edges of the shelves and the red copper of the scrubbed saucepans, a lamp was burning on the table; it was very warm from the stove, which had not yet cooled down; there was a pleasant smell of the remains of the food in a sauce with bay leaves, and of nice everyday life. Having forgotten to extinguish the lamp, she was fast asleep behind her partition – as she had lain down, without undressing, so had she fallen asleep, in the sweet hope that Adam Adamych would come again tomorrow, that she would see his frightening eyes and that, God willing, the master and mistress would once more not be at home.

But in the morning he did not come. And at dinner the master said to the mistress:

“Do you know, Adam has left for Moscow. Blagosvetlov told me. He must have popped in yesterday to say goodbye.”

3rd October 1940

Wolves

The dark of a warm August night, and the dim stars can barely be seen twinkling here and there in the cloudy sky. A soft road into the fields, rendered mute by deep dust, down which a chaise is driving with two youthful passengers: a young miss from a small estate and a grammar-school boy. Sullen flashes of summer lightning at times light up a pair of draught horses with tangled manes, running evenly in simple harness, and the peaked cap and shoulders of a lad in a hempen shirt on the box; they reveal for a moment the fields ahead, deserted after the hours of work, and a distant, sad little wood. In the village the evening before there had been noise, cries, the cowardly barking and yelping of dogs: with amazing audacity, when the people in the huts were still having supper, a wolf had killed a sheep in one of the yards and had all but carried it off – the men had leapt out in time with cudgels at the din from the dogs and had won it back, already dead, with its side ripped open. Now the young miss is chuckling nervously, lighting matches and throwing them into the darkness, crying merrily:

“I’m afraid of the wolves!”

The matches light up the elongated, rather coarse face of the youth and her excited, broad-cheekboned little face. She has a red scarf tied right around her head in the Little Russian way, the open cut of her red cotton dress reveals her round, strong neck. Rocking along with the speeding chaise, she is burning matches and throwing them into the darkness as though not noticing the schoolboy embracing her and kissing her, now on the neck, now on the cheek, searching for her lips. She elbows him aside and, deliberately loudly and simply, having the lad on the box in mind, he says to her:

“Give the matches back. I’ll have nothing to light a cigarette with.”

“In a moment, in a moment!” she cries, and again a match flares up, then a flash of lightning, and the dark is still more densely blinding with its warm blackness, in which it constantly seems that the chaise is driving backwards. She finally yields to him with a long kiss on the lips, when suddenly, shaking them both with a jolt, the chaise seems to run into something – the lad reins the horses in sharply.

“Wolves!” he cries.

Their eyes are struck by the glow of a fire in the distance to the right. The chaise is standing opposite the little wood that was being revealed in the flashes of lightning. The glow has now turned the wood black, and the whole of it is shakily flickering, just as the whole field in front of it is flickering too in the murky red tremor from the flame that is greedily rushing through the sky, and that, in spite of the distance, seems to be blazing, with the shadows of smoke racing within it, just a kilometre from the chaise, and is becoming more hotly and menacingly furious, encompassing the horizon ever higher and wider – its heat already seems to be reaching their faces, their hands, and even the red transom of some burnt-out roof is visible above the blackness of the earth. And right by the wall of the wood there stand, crimsonly grey, three big wolves, and in their eyes there are flashes now of a pellucid green lustre, now a red one – transparent and bright, like the hot syrup of redcurrant jam. And the horses, with a loud snort, strike off suddenly at a wild gallop to the side, to the left, over the ploughed field, and the lad at the reins topples backwards, as the chaise, careering about with a banging and a crashing, hits against the tops of the furrows.

Somewhere above a gully the horses reared up once again, but she, jumping up, managed to tear the reins from the hands of the crazed lad. At this point she flew into the box with all her weight and cut her cheek open on something made of iron. And thus for the whole of her life there remained a slight scar in the corner of her lips, and whenever she was asked where it was from, she would smile with pleasure:

“The doings of days long gone!” she would say, remembering that summer long ago, the dry August days and the dark nights, threshing on the threshing floor, stacks of new, fragrant straw and the unshaven schoolboy with whom she lay in them in the evenings, gazing at the brightly transient arcs of falling stars. “Some wolves scared the horses and they bolted,” she would say. “And I was hot-blooded and reckless, and threw myself to stop them…”

Those she was still to loved, as she did more than once in her life, said there was nothing sweeter than that scar, like a delicate, permanent smile.

7th October 1940