Fandango and Other Stories

by Bryan Karetnyk

  Outside, the sparrows continued their restless, relentless call, and in their cries Sergei could hear:

  “Here’s a sparrow! Me! Chir-r-rup! …”

  Sergei sighed, opened his eyes, and rose from his chair. He grinned, narrowed his eyes sweetly, yawned, and, recollecting himself, quickly burnt the letter. It burst into flames and fell to the floor as a light, gray ash. He proceeded to turn on his heel, removed from the wall a little old single-barreled rifle, and went out.

  By the gate he met Dunya’s inquiring black eyes. She was sitting on a bench with her legs tucked under her as she quickly, deftly husked seeds. Her glossy raven hair had been done in a long, taut plait and was adorned with a yellow ribbon, while her rosy face against the background of a gray, decrepit fence looked like a flower pinned to a shopkeeper’s coat.

  “Off hunting, Sergei Ivanovich?” she asked, spitting out the husks. “What a pity Mitya Spiridonov isn’t here. Oh, he could show you some spots! Used to go himself and come back all draped with birds. What didn’t he hunt! …”

  “Splendid,” said Sergei as he examined the colorful calico of Dunya’s blouse, which snugly fitted her delicate, round shoulders. “Where has he gone?”

  “Somewhere far away—you won’t spot him from here!” the girl said, laughing. “He’s with the army, in Kostroma.”

  “Splendid,” Sergei repeated with a smile. For some reason he found it amusing that Mitya Spiridonov had gone off to be a soldier and now, hair cropped, arms and legs contorted by training, would be performing all manner of acrobatic tumbles.

  “Why don’t you come with me, Dunya?” he joked. “With you there, I think we’d bag a fair amount, you and I.”

  “Me?” said Dunya coolly, before adding after a pause: “I can’t, in any case. My aunt’s asked me to keep house for a while. Her children are terrors: you look away for only a second and they’ll burn the whole place down … The very thought!”

  “I thought you were going on an outing?”

  “Yes, an outing, but not across the marshes, hitching up my skirt, wading through the grassy bog,” the girl objected vividly. “How funny you are, Sergei Ivanovich, really!”

  And, gaily laughing, she flashed her even rows of white teeth. Sergei stood there, smiling at her cheerfulness, her health, and at the sun, which cast hot shadows in the corners of the fences, which were overgrown with a multitude of dark-green nettles.

  “Well, goodbye!”

  “Will you be back for dinner?”

  “I don’t know … Will you leave me something—in case I don’t make it back in time?”

  He set off slowly, his heavy boots raising a thick cloud of dust from the road; he could feel her intent feminine gaze on his back but could not bring himself to look around.

  “What a lot of nonsense!” he yawned, smiling to himself, before turning at the corner and heading toward the river.

  III.

  Sergei had walked quite a distance, almost five miles, trudging to the point of stupefaction. As he crossed an undulating green meadow, unevenly cut by the shady zigzagging of a little river bordered with tufty clusters of willows, he recalled April. Back then this place had been cold, damp, and inhospitable. His feet had squelched nastily in the sodden, waterlogged earth, which was covered over in last year’s faded grass and rotten twigs. The slush nested in pits, traitorously covering puddles and ruts, into whose cold water frozen feet would unexpectedly plunge. Hidden by rising mist, the sun would shine diffusely. A willow had stood naked and tattered, its boughs twisted outlandishly. The river had still slept, and the ice on its decaying black banks had swelled with a filthy white crest and was marked all over with a network of animal and bird tracks. By the banks, where dirty pools of spring water had glinted meanly, early sandpipers would sway despondently and, catching sight of a man, fly off with a frightened chirp.

  Now nature seemed like an elegant woman, refreshed after a long, intoxicated night. There was a trilling in the grass, which blended its wild, monotonous melody with the cries of birds. Greens and blues, dappled with the lilac-pink pattern of blossoms, flickered in the eyes. Air streamed over a flushed face now with the dryness of heat, now in cool, balsam waves.

  Far, far away, beyond a dove-gray strip of forest, the weak, plaintive whistle of a locomotive sounded, and again the enormous, thousand-eyed city flapped its sooty iron wings before Sergei’s eyes. But now the apparition lost its acuity and flitted off into the transparent, crystalline distance. Among the flowers and hillocks, densely overgrown with redheaded haircap moss and bushes of rosehip and raspberry, it seemed wan and lifeless, like a dream of long ago. It had no place here. The curly sorrel and the lacquered green of cowberries had taken Sergei under their aegis. He adjusted the belt of his shotgun and slyly, youthfully grinned at something hiding in the depths of the bushes.

  Yellow wagtails were hopping about, coquettishly shaking their long, straight tails. Somewhere a corncrake twitched lazily. Thirst tormented Sergei, and, ducking into the splintered bushes, he made his way down a steep, rocky bank toward the shallow-flowing river. By the bank the water pooled serenely, riddled with sedge and seaweed, and a large pebble glittered in the riverbed. Crouching down and soaking his knees, Sergei saw in the water’s dusky mirror a bright, pale-blue sky, leading off somewhere below, far beneath the bank, as well as his dark face, his tangle of hair, and the swollen veins on his forehead. Having drunk from the river, he looked at himself again, a little disappointed. In the courageous, handsome face of his watery double, there was not so much as a trace of struggle. It looked calm, carefree, weary, and, as usual, a little sardonic.

  He wiped his wet lips with a handkerchief, donned his cap, and, lazily grasping at tufts of grass, clambered up, feeling the sticky, cloying anxiety travel with him, following him, clinging to him, not letting him out of its sight, and poisoning the air with its breath. It was like someone else’s bothersome cargo, which could not be unloaded until it had been dragged to a certain point. All his annoyance and bewilderment found expression in the realization of tomorrow’s inescapability. At the same time, it seemed outrageous that people whom, in the recesses of his soul, he had somehow always ranked below himself, should now very likely despise and mock him, even though now he was no worse than they. But most vexing of all was that they, these people, seemed to have been granted the right to treat him in whatever manner they pleased. Moreover—a fact that was quite ironic and absurd, though this is truly how it seemed to have come about—it was he who had granted them this right.

  This disturbing thought thrashed about and squirmed anxiously for a while, upturning a whole heap of dirty laundry that had accumulated in his soul. Other thoughts followed, indolently flaring up and plaguing him, hostile to the green, thousand-eyed life that had amassed all around. Gray and uniform, having been re-examined so many times and at such length, worn down like old coins, they lingered intrusively, lumbering and sleepy. Fragments of them, forming words about freedom, heroism, and tyranny, crawled about like pathetic, legless cripples.

  Twilight was setting in, but still he kept walking, fingering the rosary of his past, until the time came when he desired to go home. His thoughts needed walls: there, free of the open air and exhaustion, simple and unadorned, long-familiar and tired of one another, they could flow by sonorously until morning, when the broad blade of an invisible axe would fall between him and them and reveal him, Sergei, to himself.

  IV.

  By the time he reached the outskirts of town, it was already dark, depressing, and sedate. Cattle were lowing in the yards; angry women’s voices leapt out. Somewhere there were drunkards shouting. Windows were lit here and there. His weary feet burned, as though having been scalded with boiling water. He wanted to eat, then to lie down and enjoy sweet repose. Sergei pushed open the clattering gate and entered the yard.

  He was unable to see any windows through the darkness and decided at first that everyone must already be asleep. However, as he went up the creaking porch
steps, he heard amid the blackness of the slumbering, humid air the muffled sounds of conversation and a woman’s gentle laugh. Sergei pricked up his ears. A man’s voice, contented and at the same time dreamy, slowly floated across the depths of the little garden:

  “Now look here, you aren’t in the right frame of mind to grasp this … But, upon my soul, it’s true … It’s like a burst of light, a revelation. It’s even described so in many works of philosophy.”

  “I shouldn’t agree to such a thing,” Dunya’s feminine voice quickly rejoined. “Just think about it! You’ll be eaten up by worms … You can stand there like a fool your whole life. And what if all of a sudden everything goes flying out the window?”

  “Like a fool?” the man objected, taking offense. “You’ve got it all wrong. It’s the opposite—the soul receives unto itself a special gift and then everything is revealed to it … For instance … I forget what his name was … but there was once an old man who stood on a post for thirty years and three months, and by the end he reached a point where he could understand how animals think.”

  “So stand, then,” the girl continued, her barely concealed laughter quivering in her chesty, singsong voice. “Stand right there; you can pray and pray, wrack your mind about the divine, go hungry and cold—but what if you should suddenly sin in your thoughts, then to hell with all your merits. It’s awfully harsh.”

  After a brief pause, she added:

  “No. I, for one, am going to roast in hell, so it’s all the same to me. Do you suppose it’s boring there, in hell? I think the people there must be rather jolly. I’ll take you there with me, ʼMitry ʼVanych! Ha-ha!”

  Sergei stood on the porch, listening and smiling. He wanted to go into the garden, to have a peaceful, fanciful conversation, seeing neither eyes nor faces and breathing in the warm, soporific murk. But he decided not to go, for in his soul he discerned a vague, reliable presentiment that his arrival would interrupt the conversation, and everyone would suddenly feel flat and awkward.

  “Dunechka,” Dmitry Ivanych retorted in a sweet, didactic tone of voice, “although I am of course ready to follow you to the very end of the earth, to the farthest shores of Tauris—forgive me, but I have no desire to boil my soul in tar, he-he … How can you talk like that, as if you’ve stacked up some great pile of sins?!”

  An accordion let out a few spasmodic fragments.

  “I’m a terrible sinner,” the girl laughingly announced. “Oh, there’ll be no redemption for me! I sin all the time. Here you are, talking of the divine, and all I can do is laugh. I’m just sitting here with you—and for what? That’s also a sin.”

  “If you knew,” Dmitry Ivanych sighed, “the feelings … that …”

  “Please, don’t. You haven’t any feelings … Why don’t you play a little something?”

  “Oh, you cruel … umm … siren! For you, though, I’d play anything at the drop of a hat! What shall it be? There’s a good waltz I learned yesterday—it’s Mexican.”

  “N-no,” the girl drawled thoughtfully. “I’d rather that other one … ‘Fragrant Verdure.’”

  There was a silence lasting several seconds, and suddenly the accordion began to speak, powerfully and melodiously. The player’s lively fingers rapidly poured over sad, sonorous trills, growled out basses, and trembled with deep, long sighs. The tremor of the night and the warm murk disintegrated and reverberated with soft, rounded phrases, and the sounds of the waltz sounded neither trite nor alien to this backwater of life. After around five minutes, Dmitry Ivanych lustily played out a few bass notes and fell silent.

  “Wonderful!” the girl said after a pause. “Teach me to waltz, ʼMitry ʼVanych.”

  “It would be my pleasure to be of service to you,” the cavalry officer replied gallantly. “It’s the simplest thing, as it happens … How’s your lodger, by the way?”

  “My lodger?” Dunya drawled reluctantly. “He’s fine … he’s alive.”

  “He’s a conspicuous chap,” Dmitry Ivanych continued. “And so haughty, too … He’s got a ruble’s worth of ambition for every half-copeck of ammunition. Just the other day I met him here … Well, you know how it is … a little chitchat, this and that … But no! ‘Goodbye,’ he says, ‘I haven’t the time …’ Though he is, as they say, a man of erudition.”

  “You’re a fine one to talk!” the girl objected, displeased. “He’s actually very polite and quite modest. Just last night he was playing with Sanka, like a little boy.”

  “Well, yes,” Dmitry Ivanych, now insulted, remarked tetchily. “Of course, for you he probably plays at being a fine fellow … since he’s been staying with you for two months … naturally—”

  “Oh, please!” Dunya pointedly interrupted. “Don’t make insinuations! So he’s staying with us—what of it? …”

  There was a tense silence before the accordion indignantly struck up a merry, skipping polka. Sergei smiled conceitedly and, passing through the vestibule, opened the door to his room. A muggy, black void breathed in his face. After groping for his matches, he lit a lamp, gobbled down his cold dinner, changed, and, now weary, relished stretching out on the bed as he lit a cigarette. Drowsiness and fatigue had made him absolutely indifferent as to whether somebody came tomorrow or not; all that he wanted now was to sleep.

  He extinguished the lamp, rolled onto his side, and opened his eyes wide, trying to imagine that the darkness was death and that he, Sergei, had thrown the bomb and died. But nothing came of it, and even the word “death” seemed to him like an empty, meaningless sound.

  And, already falling asleep, he envisaged the strong, slender body of a girl. Perhaps it was Dunya; perhaps it was somebody else. Whoever she was, she radiated the stirring, palpitating heat of blood. And all night long he dreamt of women’s delicate, supple hands.

  V.

  When—later, after much time—Sergei came to recall everything that took place between him and his comrade, who arrived the very next day to make the final arrangements, it always seemed to him as if it had all come out “amiss somehow,” and as if there had been some sort of mistake. What this was exactly, he himself could not say. However, one thing was beyond all doubt: that the reason for this mistake lay not with him, Sergei, and not with his comrade, Valerian, but somewhere else, beyond the realm of clear, detailed analysis. It was as if each man felt awkward before the other, not on account of his attitude toward himself and others generally, but on account of that enormous, blind thing whose name is Life, which jealously guarded each of them from a simple, dispassionate understanding of someone else’s soul. This realization was also hard and unpleasant to bear because the same thing might conceivably happen again in future and once more leave in the soul the trace of painful suffering and shuddering grief.

  Sergei had not known that it would be Valerian who would come. When, next morning, the shifty, swarthy, shrill revolutionary barged into his room and began to embrace and kiss Sergei, who was still drowsy and brooding over what was to come, the latter sensed right away that their interview would be pained and unpleasant. The sudden, jerking movements of the diminutive, ebullient man betrayed so much certainty in himself and in his knowledge of people that in the first instance it seemed inadmissible to back out of a decision that had been taken long ago, clearly and decisively. But this was immediately followed by the cold, fixed obduracy of desperation, whereupon he found that he could move more freely and breathe more easily.

  Along with this, a sour, mind-numbing feeling burdened his soul, yawning and wincing like a weary cat. Everything seemed astonishingly flat, absurd, and utterly devoid of sense. While Sergei was washing and dressing, Valerian bustled about, making absentminded remarks apropos of nothing, sat down, jumped to his feet, and kept talking and talking without pause, laughing and shrieking—about “the current situation,” about Liberationists and Social Democrats, about Revolutionary Russia and the Spark,* polemics and agitation. He spoke rapidly, piercingly, without end.

  Black-haired, shaggy, and
hawk-nosed, wearing a pince-nez that covered his bulging, myopic eyes, impetuous and agitated, he seemed like a ball of nerves hastily wedged into a frail, sinuous body. Fidgeting on a chair, tilting back his head and adjusting his pince-nez every minute, taking Sergei by the hands and buttons, he would rapidly, trilling with smug, childish laughter, scatter sharp, nervous phrases. Even his clothing, intentionally garish, somewhat in the style of a southern shop assistant, roundly eclipsed Sergei’s usual string of impressions and seemingly brought with it all the echoes and excitement of far-flung provinical centers. He had known Sergei for a long time and always treated him with an air of hurried, businesslike condescension.

  When at last Sergei was ready and walked out with his comrade into the garden, where the laughing sun shone golden, scintillating among the greenery like a fine wine, where the sparrows tweeted deafeningly, and where the downy snow of the apple blossom smelled sweet, he felt his anger and alarm give way to an influx of morning cheer and an expectant indifference toward everything that Valerian might say or do. And yet, at the same time, he understood that from those very first words on the matter, it would be difficult and painful.

  They sat down on the grass, where a dense rowan bush hid the corner of a fence that flanked an old shed. Catching his breath a little and distractedly casting around his myopic eyes, Valerian was first to begin:

  “You weren’t expecting me, were you, my fine fellow? So, tell me the how and what of it, and so on and so forth. Is everything ready? Hmm? Well, tell me.”

  “The thing is …” Sergei forced a smile. “As you can see, I’ve come here, settled down, and I live … well, as you can see … in a healthy climate.”

  “Yes! Yes?! Hmm? Well?”

  “Well, it’s just … I eat, I’m putting on weight … food here is cheap. Since being here, I’ve had a hearty appetite. You might say I’ve been resurrected. You yourself saw how I was when I left—like a lemon …”

  “Like a squeezed lemon, ha-ha! Now, as for that matter … Have you covered your tracks here? Is anyone watching you?”