Dark Avenues / Темные аллеи. Книга для чтения на английском языке

“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[101 - draught horse – упряжная лошадь] with tangled manes, running evenly in simple harness, and the peaked cap and shoulders of a lad in a hempen shirt[102 - hempen shirt – замашная рубаха (сделанная из домотканого холста)] 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[103 - all but – едва не] 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[104 - the Little Russian way: Little Russia is a now archaic alternative name for Ukraine. (прим. перев.) по-малорусски], 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![105 - The doings of days long gone! – Дела давно минувших дней!]” 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

Calling Cards

It was the beginning of autumn, and the steamboat Goncharov was running down the now empty Volga. Early cold spells had set in, and over the grey floods of the river’s Asiatic expanse, from its eastern, already reddened banks, a freezing wind was blowing hard and fast against it, pulling on the flag at the stern, and on the hats, caps and clothes of those walking on the deck, wrinkling their faces, beating at their sleeves and skirts. The steamboat was accompanied both aimlessly and tediously by a single seagull – at times it would fly in an outward curve, banking on sharp wings, right behind the stern; at times it would slip away at an angle into the distance, off to the side, as if not knowing what to do with itself in this wilderness of the great river and the grey autumnal sky.

And the steamboat was almost empty – there was only an artel of peasants on the lower deck, while backwards and forwards on the upper one, meeting and parting, walked just three people: two from second class, who were both travelling to the same place somewhere and were inseparable, always strolling together, continually talking about something in a businesslike way, and like one another in their inconspicuousness, and a first-class passenger, a man of about thirty, a writer who had recently become famous, conspicuous in his not exactly sad, not exactly angry seriousness and in part in his appearance: he was tall, robust – he even stooped slightly, as some strong people do – well dressed and in his way handsome – a brown-haired man of that eastern Russian type that is sometimes encountered among Moscow’s merchant folk of long standing[106 - of long standing – старинный]; he was indeed one of those folk by origin, although he no longer had anything in common with them.

He walked on his own with a firm step, in expensive and sturdy footwear, in a black cheviot overcoat[107 - cheviot overcoat – шевиотовое пальто (выполненное из мягкой, слегка ворсистой шерстяной ткани)] and a checked English cap, paced backwards and forwards, now against the wind, now with the wind, breathing that powerful air of the autumn and the Volga. He would reach the stern, stand at it, gazing at the river’s grey ripples unfolding and racing along behind the steamboat, and, turning sharply, would again walk towards the bow, into the wind, bending his head in the puffed-out cap and listening to the rhythmic beating of the paddlewheel blades, from which there streamed a glassy canvas of roaring water. At last he suddenly paused and gave a sullen smile: there had appeared, coming up out of the stairwell from the lower deck, from third class, a rather cheap black hat, and underneath it the hollow-cheeked, sweet face of the woman whose acquaintance he had made by chance the previous evening. He set off towards her with long strides. Coming up onto the deck completely, she set off awkwardly in his direction too, and also with a smile, chased along by the wind, all aslant because of it, holding on to her hat with a thin hand, and wearing a light little coat, beneath which could be seen slender legs.

“How did you sleep?” he said loudly and manfully while still on the move.

“Wonderfully!” she replied, immoderately cheerful. “I always sleep like a log…[108 - I always sleep like a log… – Я всегда сплю, как сурок (букв.: как бревно)]”

He retained her hand in his big one and looked into her eyes. She met his gaze with a joyful effort.

“Why did you sleep so long, my angel?” he said with familiarity. “Good people are already having lunch.”

“Daydreaming all the time!” she answered in a brisk manner, quite at odds with[109 - at odds with – несоответственно] her entire appearance.

“And what about?”

“All sorts of things!”

“Oh dear, watch out! ‘Thus little children they do drown, whilst bathing in the summer weather, the Chechen’s there across the river’[110 - Thus little children… across the river: An inaccurate quotation from the ‘Circassian Song’ in Alexander Pushkin’s narrative poem A Prisoner in the Caucasus (1822). (прим. перев.) А. С. Пушкин предостерегает казака, плывущего через реку: Как тонут маленькие дети,/ Купаясь жаркою порой:/ Чеченец ходит за рекой.].”

“And it’s the Chechen that I’m waiting for!” she replied with the same cheerful briskness.

“Better let’s go and have vodka and fish soup,” he said, thinking: she probably doesn’t even have the money to buy lunch.

She began stamping her feet coquettishly:

“Yes, yes, vodka, vodka! It’s hellish cold!”

And they set off at a rapid pace for the first-class dining room, she in front, he behind her, already examining her with a certain greed.

He had thought about her in the night. The day before, he had started speaking to her by chance and made her acquaintance by the steamboat’s side, as it had approached some high, black bank in the dusk, beneath which there was already a scattering of lights; he had then sat with her on deck, on a long bench running the length of the first-class cabins, beneath their windows with white slatted shutters, but had not sat for long and had regretted it in the night. To his surprise, he had realized in the night that he already wanted her. Why? Out of the habit of being attracted to chance and unknown travelling women while on the road? Now, sitting with her in the dining room, clinking glasses to the accompaniment of cold, unpressed caviar[111 - unpressed caviar – зернистая икра] and a hot kalach[112 - kalach: A round, white, wheatmeal loaf. (прим. перев.)], he already knew why she attracted him so, and impatiently awaited the matter being brought to a conclusion. Because of the fact that all this – both the vodka and her familiarity – was in astonishing contradiction to her, he was inwardly getting more and more excited.

“Well then, another one each and that’ll do!” he says.

“Quite right, that’ll do,” she replies, striking the same note. “But it’s splendid vodka!”

Of course, she had touched him with the way she had become so confused the day before when he had told her his name, the way she had been stunned by this unexpected acquaintance with a famous writer – sensing and seeing that confusion was, as always, pleasant, it always disposes you favourably towards a woman, if she is not utterly plain and stupid; it immediately creates a certain intimacy between you and her, lends you boldness in your treatment of her and as though a certain right to her already. But it was not this alone that aroused him: he had apparently struck her as a man as well, while it was with all her poverty and simple-heartedness that she had touched him. He had already adopted an unceremonious way with female admirers, an easy and rapid transition from the first minutes of acquaintance with them to a freedom of manner, ostensibly artistic, and that affected simplicity of questioning: who are you? where from? married or not? He had asked questions like that the day before too – he had gazed into the dusk of the evening at the multicoloured lights on the buoys forming long reflections in the darkening water around the steamboat, at the campfires burning red on the rafts, he had sensed the smell of the smoke from them, thinking: “This needs to be remembered – straight away there seems to be the smell of fish soup in that smoke,” and had asked:

“May I learn your name?”

She had quickly told him her first name and patronymic.

“Are you returning home from somewhere?”

“I’ve been in Sviyazhsk at my sister’s. Her husband died suddenly, and she was left in a terrible situation, you see.”

At first she had been so confused that she had kept on looking somewhere into the distance. Then she had started answering more boldly.

“And are you married too?”

She had begun grinning strangely:

“I am. And, alas, not for the first year…”

“Why ‘alas’?”

“In my stupidity I hurried into it too early. You don’t have time to look around before your life’s gone by!”