Meanwhile Zinaida went on playing with me like a cat with a mouse. Sometimes she was coquettish—and I melted and was filled with anguish; then she would suddenly push me away—and I would not dare to approach her, nor even look at her.
She had been very cold towards me for several days, I remember, and I had altogether lost heart; when I timidly slipped into their lodge, I tried to stay close to the old princess, though she had become very cantankerous and crotchety just at that point—the business of her bills of exchange was going badly, and she had already had two interviews with the local police chief.
One day I was walking in our garden near that same fence—and I saw Zinaida. She was sitting on the grass, leaning on both arms, and not moving. I tried to slip away, but she suddenly raised her head and made a commanding gesture. I froze to the spot, not understanding what she meant. She repeated her gesture and I hopped over the fence at once, and ran joyfully up to her; but she halted me with a look and pointed to the path two steps away from her. Full of embarrassment, and not knowing what to do, I knelt down at the edge of the path. She was so pale, every feature was full of such bitter grief, such profound weariness, that my heart was pierced, and I found myself stammering, ‘What’s wrong?’
Zinaida stretched out a hand, pulled up a blade of grass, bit it and tossed it away from her.
‘Do you love me very much?’ she finally asked. ‘Yes? You do?’
I didn’t answer. What would have been the point?
‘Yes,’ she repeated. ‘That’s how it is. The same eyes,’ she went on, then fell into thought, covering her face with her hands. ‘Everything repels me now,’ she whispered. ‘I wish I could run away to the ends of the earth … I can’t bear this, I can’t cope … And what I’ve got ahead of me! … Oh, I’m so miserable … my God, how miserable I am!’
‘Why?’ I asked timidly.
Zinaida did not answer, but merely shrugged her shoulders. I stayed kneeling there, gazing at her in deepest misery. Every word she spoke had cut into my heart. At that moment, I believe I would have gladly given up my life to save her from her grief. I gazed at her, and—despite not understanding why she was wretched—I vividly pictured to myself how she had suddenly rushed out into the garden, overcome with unbearable sorrow, and flung herself down on the grass as if felled by a blow. Everything around her was light and green, the wind rustled the leaves on the trees, now and then waving the long cane of a raspberry bush over her head. Somewhere, doves were cooing; the bees hummed as they skimmed low over the scanty grass. The gentle blue sky shone overhead. And I felt so sorrowful …
‘Recite me some poetry,’ said Zinaida in an undertone, leaning on one elbow. ‘I like it when you recite poetry. You have a sing-song voice, but never mind—you’re young. Recite “On the Hills of Georgia” for me. Only sit down first.’
I sat down and recited ‘On the Hills of Georgia’.
‘“Because the heart’s unable not to love”,’ repeated Zinaida. ‘That’s what’s good about poetry—it tells us things that don’t exist, but things that are better than what does exist—and not only that, things that are more like the truth … The heart’s unable not to love—and it would like not to, but it can’t help it!’ She fell silent again, then suddenly gave a shiver and stood up. ‘Come on. Maidanov is sitting with Mama; he brought me his poem, and I walked out on him. Now he’s upset as well … what can I do! One day you’ll find out … only don’t be angry with me!’
Zinaida hurriedly squeezed my hand and ran off ahead of me. We went back to the lodge. Maidanov started reciting his recently printed poem ‘The Murderer’, but I wasn’t listening. He was declaiming his iambic tetrameters, droning and shouting; the rhymes jingled, turn and turn about, like little bells, noisy and meaningless, while I just looked at Zinaida and tried to understand what she had meant by those last words of hers.
‘Or can it be, some secret rival
Has overcome thee in my stead?—’
Maidanov suddenly cried, in his nasal voice—and my eyes met Zinaida’s. She lowered hers and blushed slightly. I saw her blush, and felt a chill of dread. I had been jealous of her before, but it was only at this instant that the thought dawned on me that she had fallen in love. ‘My God! She’s in love!’
X
That was when my real torments began. I racked my brains, turning the question over and over in my mind, and kept an unremitting watch on Zinaida—in secret, as far as I could. She had changed—that was quite clear. She went out for solitary walks, and stayed out a long time. Sometimes she didn’t show her face at all, but spent hours on end in her room. She had never behaved like that before. I suddenly became, or fancied I had become, extraordinarily observant.
‘Is it him? Or could it even be him?’ I wondered to myself, passing uneasily in my mind from one of her admirers to another. Count Malevsky (though I felt ashamed for Zinaida when I thought of him) secretly seemed to me the most dangerous.
For all my observation, I never saw beyond the end of my nose; and my attempts at secrecy probably deceived no one. Doctor Lushin, at least, soon saw through me. But he too had undergone a change of late. He had lost weight, and although he laughed just as often, it sounded hollow, more curt and bitter. His light irony, his affected cynicism, had given way to an uncontrollable nervous irritability.
‘Why do you keep endlessly hanging around here, young man?’ he once asked me when we were alone in the Zasekins’ salon. (The young princess hadn’t returned from her walk, while her mother’s shrill voice could be heard from upstairs, swearing at her chambermaid.) ‘You ought to be working, you ought to be at your studies, while you’re young; what are you doing here?’
‘You can’t know whether I work at home,’ I returned rather haughtily, but in some embarrassment.
‘What do you mean, you’re working? That’s not what’s on your mind at all. Still, don’t let’s argue about it—it’s natural at your age. Only you’ve made a very unfortunate choice. Can’t you see what sort of a household this is?’
‘I don’t understand you,’ I said.
‘You don’t? So much the worse for you. But I consider it my duty to put you on your guard. For someone like me, an old bachelor, it’s all right to come here—what could happen to me? Our sort, we’ve been through it all, you can’t hurt us; but you’ve still got delicate skin. The air’s bad for you here—believe me, it could make you ill.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Just that. Are you well now? Are you in a normal state? Is it healthy, what you’re feeling? Is it good for you?’
‘What am I feeling?’ I echoed. But I knew in my heart that the doctor was right.
‘Oh, young man, young man,’ the doctor went on, giving those two words an intonation that seemed very insulting to me. ‘What’s the use of pretending? You’re still at the age when you wear your heart on your sleeve—anyone can read your feelings. Anyway, why go on about it? I’d stop coming here myself, if I …’ (and the doctor gritted his teeth) ‘… if I wasn’t such an odd fish. But here’s what astonishes me. How is it that you, an intelligent lad, don’t see what’s going on around you?’
‘What is going on?’ I rejoined, tense and on my guard.
The doctor gave me an ironic, pitying look.
‘And I’m a fine one myself,’ he went on, half to himself; ‘as if he needed to be told … Anyway,’ he added, raising his voice, ‘I repeat: the atmosphere round here is no good for you. You like it here—but so what? The air smells good in a greenhouse too, but you can’t spend your life there. Honestly, listen to me—go back to your Kaidanov!’
The princess came in and began complaining to the doctor about her toothache. Then Zinaida appeared.
‘Here, Doctor,’ the princess said, ‘you should give her a talking-to. She drinks iced water all day long: is that good for her, with her weak chest?’
‘Why do you do that?’ asked Lushin.
‘Why, what harm can it do?’
‘What? You
could catch cold and die.’
‘Really? You mean that? So much the better, then!’
‘So that’s how it is!’ muttered the doctor. The old princess left the room.
‘That’s how it is,’ repeated Zinaida. ‘Do you think it’s fun, living like this? Just look around you … Good, is it? Do you think I can’t understand it? Can’t feel it? I enjoy drinking iced water. Can you seriously tell me I shouldn’t risk a life like this one for a moment’s enjoyment? Let alone a moment’s happiness?’
‘Well yes,’ remarked Lushin, ‘whimsy and wilfulness. Those two words sum you up. Your whole character lies in those two words.’
Zinaida gave a brittle laugh.
‘You’ve missed the boat, my dear Doctor. You haven’t got your eyes open, you aren’t keeping up. Put on your glasses. I’m bored with whimsy now. Making fools of you all, making a fool of myself—what’s the fun in that? As for wilfulness … Monsieur Voldemar,’ she suddenly added, stamping her little foot, ‘don’t put on that lugubrious face. I can’t stand people feeling sorry for me.’ And she walked quickly away.
‘It’s bad for you, young man, bad for you, the atmosphere round here,’ Lushin said again.
XI
That same evening the usual guests gathered at the Zasekins’, and I was one of them.
The conversation turned to Maidanov’s poem. Zinaida praised it from her heart.
‘But do you know what?’ she asked him. ‘If I were a poet, I’d write about something different. Maybe this is all nonsense, but I sometimes get odd ideas in my head, especially when I can’t sleep, in the early mornings when the sky is just beginning to turn pink and grey. For instance, I would … You won’t laugh at me?’
‘No, no!’ we all exclaimed with one voice.
‘Well,’ she went on, folding her arms on her bosom and looking away to one side, ‘I’d describe … a whole company of young girls, by night, in a big boat—on a quiet river. The moon is shining, they’re all dressed in white, with garlands of white flowers, and they’re singing, you know, something like a hymn.’
‘I see, yes, I see—go on,’ Maidanov pronounced in a meaningful, dreamy voice.
‘Then, suddenly—noise, laughter, torches, jingling bells on the banks … it’s a crowd of Bacchantes racing along, singing songs and shouting. Well, it’s up to you, master Poet, to paint the picture … only I’d like the torches to burn red, with a lot of smoke, and for the Bacchantes to have eyes that glitter under their garlands, and the garlands have to be dark. And don’t forget the tiger skins and the goblets—and gold, a lot of gold.’
‘Where’s the gold supposed to be?’ asked Maidanov, tossing back his lank hair and flaring his nostrils.
‘Where? On their shoulders, their arms, their feet, everywhere. They say that women in ancient times wore gold bangles round their ankles. The Bacchantes are calling the girls in the boat, to come and join them. The girls have stopped singing their hymn, they can’t go on with it; but they don’t move. The river carries them to the bank. And now suddenly one of them rises quietly to her feet … That has to be described well: how she stands up quietly in the moonlight, and how alarmed her friends are … She has stepped off the edge of the boat, the Bacchantes have surrounded her, and carried her off into the darkness and the night … Describe the billowing smoke, and the general confusion. All you can hear is their shrieks. And her wreath is left behind on the riverbank.’
Zinaida fell silent. (‘Oh! she’s fallen in love!’ I thought once more.)
‘Is that all?’ asked Maidanov.
‘That’s all,’ she replied.
‘That couldn’t be the subject of a long poem,’ he declared pompously. ‘But I’ll use your idea for a piece of lyrical verse.’
‘In the Romantic style?’ asked Malevsky.
‘Yes, Romantic, of course. Byronic.’
‘But in my view, Hugo is better than Byron,’ opined the young count carelessly. ‘More interesting.’
‘Hugo is a first-class writer,’ replied Maidanov. ‘And my friend Tonkosheyev, in his Spanish romance El Trovador—’
‘Oh, is that the book with the upside-down question marks?’ Zinaida interrupted him.
‘Yes. The Spanish do that. I wanted to say that Tonkosheyev—’
‘Oh, you’re going to have another argument about Classicism and Romanticism,’ interrupted Zinaida a second time. ‘Let’s play a game instead.’
‘Forfeits?’ suggested Lushin.
‘No, forfeits are boring. Let’s play comparisons.’ (This was a game Zinaida herself had invented. Some object was named, and everyone would try to compare it with something else, and whoever thought up the best comparison got a prize.)
She walked over to the window. The sun had just set, and long reddish clouds stretched high across the sky.
‘What do those clouds look like?’ asked Zinaida, and without waiting for an answer, went on: ‘I think they look like those purple sails on Cleopatra’s golden ship, when she sailed off to meet Antony. Do you remember, Maidanov, you were telling me about that not long ago?’
We all agreed, like Polonius in Hamlet, that the clouds were indeed very like those sails, and that none of us could think of a better comparison.
‘And how old was Antony at the time?’ asked Zinaida.
‘He must certainly have been a young man,’ remarked Malevsky.
‘Yes, a young man,’ Maidanov confidently asserted.
‘Pardon me,’ exclaimed Lushin, ‘he was over forty.’
‘Over forty,’ repeated Zinaida, casting him a quick glance.
I soon left, and went home. ‘She’s in love’—my lips formed the words by themselves. ‘But with whom?’
XII
Days passed. Zinaida became more and more strange and mysterious. One day I came into her house and found her sitting in a basket chair with her head pressed against the sharp edge of a table. She straightened herself up and I saw—her whole face was wet with tears.
‘Oh! it’s you!’ she said with a bitter smile. ‘Just come over here.’
I went up to her. She laid her hand on my head, and suddenly seized hold of my hair and began twisting it.
‘That’s painful …’ I eventually said.
‘Painful, is it? And aren’t I in pain? Aren’t I?’ she demanded.
‘Oh!’ she cried out suddenly, realizing that she had pulled out a little tuft of my hair. ‘What have I done! Poor Monsieur Voldemar!’
Carefully she straightened out the tuft of hair, wound it round her finger and twisted it into a ring.
‘I’ll put your hair in a locket and wear it,’ she said, with the tears still shining in her eyes. ‘Perhaps that’ll console you a little … and now, goodbye.’
I went back home, where I found an unpleasant scene in progress. My mother was having a row with my father; she was accusing him of something, while he, as always, was preserving a cold, polite silence—soon he left and drove away. I couldn’t hear what my mother was saying—besides which, I had other things on my mind. All I remember is that at the end of their argument she had me summoned to her dressing room, where she expressed strong disapproval of my frequent visits to the old princess, whom she described as une femme capable de tout. I kissed her hand (which I always did when I wanted to cut short a conversation), and went to my own room. Zinaida’s tears had completely thrown me; I had no idea what to think, and I was on the verge of tears myself—after all, I was still a child, for all my sixteen years. I had given up worrying about Malevsky, though Belovzorov was growing more threatening day by day—he kept looking at the slippery count the way a wolf looks at a sheep. In fact I no longer thought about anything or anyone. I lost myself in my imaginings, and constantly sought out solitary places. I became particularly attached to the ruined greenhouse. I would climb up onto the high wall, and stay sitting there; I was such an unhappy, lonely, miserable youth that I felt sorry for myself—and yet how fond I was of those mournful feelings, how I exulted in them!
Once I was sitting on the wall, gazing into the distance and listening to the bells chiming … Suddenly I felt a sensation running through me—not quite a gust of wind, not quite a shiver, but something like a waft of air, an awareness of someone close by … I looked down. On the path below me, Zinaida was hurrying past, in a flimsy grey dress and with a pink parasol over her shoulder. She saw me and stopped, pushed aside the brim of her straw hat and looked up at me with her velvet eyes.
‘What are you doing, so high up there?’ she asked, with an odd smile. ‘Look, you keep swearing that you love me—well, if you really love me, jump down and join me here on the path.’
No sooner were the words out than I was flying down as though someone had given me a shove in the back. The wall was about fourteen feet high. I landed on my feet, but I hit the ground so hard that I could not keep my footing. I fell over and briefly passed out. When I recovered my senses, without opening my eyes I could feel Zinaida next to me.
‘My darling boy,’ she said, leaning over me, and her voice was filled with alarm and tenderness—‘how could you do that, how could you obey me like that … You know I love you … Get up.’
Love and Youth Page 4