“No… why should it have been?”
“And… it wasn’t stupid? After all, I suppose it meant I’m nowhere near close to him yet.”
“On the contrary, it was a nice, honest and spontaneous thing
to say. You were so lovely at that moment! With all his aristocratic graces he’d have had to be very stupid indeed not to have appreciated that.”
“You seem angry with him, Vanya? But how nasty I am though, how suspicious and vain! Don’t laugh, you know I don’t hide anything from you. Oh, Vanya, you’re such a good friend! If I’m unhappy again, if I’m in trouble, you’ll stay by me, won’t you? Probably no one else will! How can I ever make up to you for everything? Vanya, you won’t ever think badly of me, will you?…”
As soon as I got home I undressed and went to bed. It was as damp and dark in my room as in a cellar. I was haunted by strange thoughts and feelings and for a long time I could not get to sleep.
But how a certain individual must have been laughing at that moment as he fell asleep in his comfortable bed! That is if he thought us worthy of his mirth, which he probably did not!
3
The following morning at about ten o’clock, as I was hurrying out of the house to get to the Ikhmenevs on Vasìlevsky Island, in order to proceed as quickly as possible to Natasha’s, I ran into my visitor of the day before, Smith’s granddaughter. She was on her way to visit me. I don’t know why, but I remember I was delighted to see her. The previous evening I had not even had time to have a good look at her, but now by daylight she surprised me even more. It would be hard to find a stranger, more unusual creature, at least by outward appearances. Small, with flashing, somehow un-Russian black eyes, thick tousled black hair and a mysterious, obstinately questioning gaze, she could have drawn the attention of any passer-by in the street. Her expression was particularly striking – a mixture of sparkling intelligence and a kind of inquisitive mistrust, even suspiciousness. Her bedraggled and dirty frock looked even more tattered by daylight than it had the night before. I thought she seemed to be suffering from some chronic illness that was gradually but relentlessly destroying her. Her pale, thin face was of a yellow, unnaturally sallow hue. But on the whole, in spite of all the ravages of poverty and disease, she was quite a pretty little thing. Her eyebrows were sharp, fine and beautiful; her wide, fairly low forehead was particularly lovely, and her lips were beautifully shaped, with a sort of proud, brave cast, but pallid, with just a touch of colour in them.
“Ah, it’s you again!” I exclaimed, “I thought you might come. Come in!”
She stepped slowly across the threshold like the day before, gazing around anxiously. She carefully surveyed the room where her grandfather had lived, as if noting how much the room had been changed by its new occupant. Like grandfather, like granddaughter, I thought. Is she all there? I wondered. She didn’t speak. I waited.
“I came for the books!” she whispered at last, lowering her gaze.
“Ah, yes! Your books, here they are, take them! I kept them specially for you.”
She looked at me curiously and her mouth gave a strange little twist as if she wanted to venture a hesitant smile. But the impulse to smile faded and her expression again took on its former severe and enigmatic aspect.
“Did Granddad really speak to you about me?” she asked, looking me up and down ironically.
“No, he didn’t speak about you, but he—”
“So how did you know I’d come? Who told you?” she asked, interrupting me quickly.
“Because I didn’t think your grandfather could have survived on his own, abandoned by everyone. He was so old and weak, that’s why I thought someone must have been coming to visit him. Here, take your books. Are you studying from them?”
“No.”
“So what do you want them for?”
“Granddad used to teach me when I came to see him.”
“And did you stop coming to see him?”
“Later I did… I fell ill,” she added as if to justify herself.
“Have you got any family – mother, father?”
She suddenly frowned and even shot me a fearful glance. Then, just as the previous day, she lowered her eyes, turned and headed for the door without favouring me with an answer. I watched her in astonishment. But she stopped at the threshold.
“What did he die of?” she asked abruptly, turning slightly towards me with precisely the same gesture and movement as the day before, when as she was going out she had stopped and, facing the door, enquired about Azorka.
I went up to her to tell her briefly what happened. She listened with silent curiosity, her eyes cast down and her back to me. I told her also how, when he was dying, the old man had talked about Sixth Lane.
“I guessed,” I added, “that probably someone dear to him lived there, so I expected someone to come and enquire after him. He must have loved you, since he thought of you in his last moments.”
“No,” she whispered almost to herself, “he didn’t love me.”
She was very upset. As I talked I kept leaning down to her to look in her face. I noticed that she was struggling desperately to control her agitation, as though she were too proud to let me see it. She was turning paler and paler and biting hard on her lower lip. But what struck me most forcibly was the frantic beating of her heart. It thumped harder and harder until it could be heard at two or three paces, as if she were having a heart attack. I thought she was going to burst into tears as she had done the day before, but she regained her self-control.
“Where’s the fence?”
“What fence?”
“The one where he died.”
“I’ll show you… when we go out. Now listen, what’s your name?”
“Don’t…”
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t… it doesn’t matter. I haven’t got a name,” she said abruptly, in apparent ill humour, and made as if to go. I stopped her.
“Stop, you funny little girl! I want to help you, you know. I’ve felt so sorry for you ever since yesterday when you were crying in the corner on the stairs. I can’t bear to think of it… Anyway, your grandfather died in my arms, and he was probably thinking of you when he mentioned Sixth Lane, so in a manner of speaking he left you in my care. I dream about him… I kept your books for you, and you’re such a wild little thing, as if you’re afraid of me. You’re obviously very poor and perhaps an orphan left with strangers, is that so?”
I did my best to win her over, and I don’t know myself why I was so drawn to her. There was something besides pity in my feelings towards her. Whether it was the mysteriousness of the circumstances, or the impression that Smith had left on me, or my own whimsical mood – I just don’t know, but something drew me irresistibly to her. My words seemed to touch a chord in her; she looked at me strangely, not harshly any more, but mildly and steadily; then she looked down again as if lost in thought.
“Yelena,” she whispered suddenly, unexpectedly and very softly.
“Is that your name then, Yelena?”
“Yes…”
“So then, will you come and visit me?”
“I can’t… I don’t know… I’ll come,” she whispered thoughtfully as though in some inner struggle. Just then a wall clock suddenly struck somewhere. She shuddered and, looking at me with indescribable anguish, whispered, “What time is it?”
“Must be half-past ten.”
She let out a cry of alarm.
“Oh God!” she said and started to run. But I stopped her again in the hallway.
“I’m not letting you go like that,” I said. “What are you afraid of? Are you late?”
“Yes, yes, I sneaked out! Let me go! She’ll beat me!” she cried, evidently having said more than she meant to, and tore herself free from my grasp.
“Listen, don’t rush! You have to go to Vasìlevsky
Island, and so have I, to Thirteenth Lane. I’m late too and I’m going to take a cab. Do you want to come with me? I’ll take you. It’ll be quicker than walking…”
“You mustn’t come to the house, you mustn’t,” she cried in even greater terror. Her face was fairly distorted with fear at the mere thought that I might go to the house where she lived.
“I told you, I’m going to Thirteenth Lane on my own business, not to your house! I won’t follow you. We’ll get there quickly in a cab. Come on!”
We ran downstairs quickly. I hailed the first cab that came in sight, a decidedly rickety affair. Yelena was obviously in a great hurry or she would not have agreed to get in with me. What was even more baffling to me subsequently was that I did not even dare question her. When I asked her who it was at home that she was so frightened of, she threw up her arms and practically leapt out of the cab. What’s all the mystery about? I wondered.
She was very uncomfortable, sitting in the cab. With every jolt she grabbed at my coat for support with her dirty, chapped little left hand. In her other hand she was clutching her books tightly; it was obvious they were very precious to her. Trying to adjust her posture, she exposed her foot, and to my astonishment I noticed that she was wearing only a pair of worn-out shoes with no stockings. Now, although I had decided not to ask her anything, once again I couldn’t restrain myself.
“Haven’t you got any stockings?” I asked. “How can you go barefoot when it’s so cold and damp?”
“No, I haven’t” she answered curtly.
“Good Lord, you must live with someone! You could have asked for stockings if you had to go out.”
“I do as I please.”
“But you’ll catch your death of cold.”
“So what?”
She clearly did not want to answer and was getting angry at my questions.
“This is where he died,” I said, pointing out to her the house where the old man had collapsed.
She gazed at it and suddenly, turning to me with an imploring look, said, “For God’s sake, don’t come in. But I’ll come to see you, I will! As soon as I can, I’ll come!”
“All right. I’ve already told you I won’t come in. But what are you afraid of? You’re obviously unhappy about something. I don’t like to see you like this…”
“I’m not afraid of anyone,” she replied with a kind of irritation in her voice.
“But just now you said, ‘She’ll beat me.’”.
“Let her!” she answered, and her eyes flashed. “Let her! Let her beat me!” she repeated bitterly, and her upper lip trembled and lifted slightly in scorn.
At last we arrived on Vasìlevsky Island. She stopped the cab at the top of Sixth Lane and jumped out, looking around anxiously.
“Keep going! I’ll come, I will!” she repeated, imploring me frantically not to follow her. “Drive on, quickly, quickly!”
I drove on. But a few yards along the embankment, I dismissed the cabby and turned back into Sixth Lane, quickly crossing over to the other side. I saw her; she had not yet had time to get far, although she was walking fast and kept looking around; she even stopped for a second to check if I was following her. But I dived into a nearby doorway and she failed to notice me. She went on and I followed her, keeping to the other side of the street.
My curiosity was thoroughly aroused. Although I had no intention of going in, I was determined to find out which house she would enter, just in case. I was in a state of deep, strange emotional unease, not unlike what had been brought on by her grandfather in the coffee house about the time that Azorka died…
4
We walked a long way, as far as Maly Prospect. She was almost running; then she darted into a shop. I stopped and waited. Surely, she can’t live in a shop, I thought.
And indeed, a minute later she came out, but she no longer had the books. Instead, she was carrying an earthenware bowl. Having walked a little further, she passed through the gate of a rather nondescript house. It was an old, small, though stone, two-storey structure, painted a dirty yellow. In one of the three-ground floor windows was a miniature red coffin – indicating that a coffin-maker ran a small business from there. The windows of the upper floor were extremely small and square with cracked dull-green panes, through which one glimpsed a set of pink cotton curtains. I crossed the street, went up to the house and read on a metal plaque above the gate: “Mrs Bubnova”.
But no sooner had I made out the inscription than a woman’s piercing scream resounded from the yard of Mrs Bubnova’s house, followed by a torrent of abuse. I peered through the gate; on the wooden steps of the house stood a fat woman, a typical townie, in a bonnet and a green shawl. Her face bore a revolting purplish tinge; her small, deep-set, bloodshot eyes glistened with fury. Even though it was not yet noon, she was already under the influence. She was screaming at poor Yelena, who stood before her rigid with fear, holding the bowl in her hands. On the steps, peering over the shoulder of the purple-faced woman, stood another dishevelled female, brightly rouged and heavily powdered. In a little while the basement door opened and, doubtless attracted by the screaming, a middle-aged, poorly dressed woman of demure and modest appearance came out onto the steps. Through this half-open door peered the other occupants of the ground floor, a frail old man and a girl. A tall, strapping fellow, probably the caretaker, stood in the middle of the yard with a broom in his hands and surveyed the whole scene abstractedly.
“Oh you damned bloodsucker, you louse, you!” the woman screamed, letting out an unpunctuated stream of abuse, gasping but not pausing for breath, “so this is how you repay me for all my care, you shaggy wretch! I send her for some gherkins and off she sneaks! I knew it in my heart when I sent her she’d slope off. I felt it in me bones, I did! Last night I practically scalped her for it and today she’s up to the same old trick! Where’ve you been, you strumpet, where? Who could you go running to, you damned freak, you poisonous wretch, who? Tell me, you bog-trotting vermin, or I’ll strangle you on the spot!”
And the infuriated woman rushed at the poor child, but catching sight of the woman from the basement who was watching from the steps, stopped short and turned to her, yelling more shrilly than ever and waving her arms as though appealing to her to bear witness to the monstrous crime of her pitiful victim.
“When her mother snuffed it you know yourselves, good people, she was left with no one in the world. I saw you poor folks had nothing to eat yourselves, never mind having her on your hands, so I thought, well, for St Nicholas’s sake I’ll do the orphan a favour and take her in. And I did. Can you imagine though? I’ve been looking after her two months now and the whole two months she’s been doing nothing but bleed me dry, gnaw at my milky-white flesh! You leech! Rattlesnake! You bloody-minded she-devil! She won’t say a word if I beat her or not, she won’t, you know. She just keeps mum – stubborn as a mule! She’s doing my head in with her dumb insolence. Who do you think you are, a grand lady or something, you pink-arsed monkey? If it hadn’t been for me you’d have starved to death in the streets. You should be ready to wash my feet and drink the water, you little monster, you thorn in my flesh! You’d have been done for but for me!”
“Come now, Anna Trifonovna, what are you getting yourself so worked up about?” the woman whom the furious termagant was addressing asked respectfully. “What has she done to upset you now?”
“You may well ask, my good woman. I won’t be thwarted! Right or wrong, I expect to be obeyed. That’s how I am. She almost sent me to an early grave this morning! I send her to the shop for some pickled gherkins, and she comes back three hours later! I knew it, and my heart bled – it did you know, my poor heart, it bled, it did! Where you’ve been? Where did you go? Who are your cronies now? Haven’t I been good to her? Her slut of a mother never paid me back the fourteen roubles she owed me and I had to bury her at my own expense, which meant I was left with the little minx on my hands
, but you know all this, dear lady, you know it! Doesn’t that give me a claim over her? You’d have expected her to have some feelings, but instead she goes against me! I meant to make her happy. I wanted to dress her in muslin shifts, the little strumpet. I bought her boots on the market and dressed her up to the nines – a sight for sore eyes she was! And what do you think she did, good people? In two days she had ripped the shift to shreds, ripped it to bits, and that’s how she walks around now, she does! And don’t get me wrong, she did it deliberately – never a truer word’s been spoken, saw it with my own eyes. ‘Don’t want any fancy stuff, just plain clothes,’ she reckons. Well, that’s as much as I could stand, so I gave her the thrashing of her life, had to call out the doctor and pay him good money in the end. If I went and killed you, you little louse, no milk for a week would be my only penance! I got her to scrub the floors in punishment. And imagine – she did! Just carried on scrubbing, the vixen did! I was sorely pained – but she wouldn’t let up, she wouldn’t! Well, I thought to myself, she’s bound to give me the slip! And, no sooner had I thought of it – she was gone, yesterday, to be sure! You heard yourselves, good people, how I beat her for it, fairly hurt my hands on her, left her without shoes or stockings, thinking to myself, she’s not likely to scarper barefoot. But she only does it and goes there again today! Where’ve you been? Answer me! Who did you complain to, you snake in the grass, who did you go and bleat to? Answer me, you gypsy, you foreign spook, speak up!”
Beside herself with fury, she pounced on the little girl who was out of her mind with fright, grabbed her by the hair and hurled her to the ground. The bowl with the pickled gherkins was knocked out of her hands and shattered; this enraged the drunken termagant even more. She hit her victim across the face and head, but Yelena stubbornly kept her silence – not a sound, not a squeak, not a word of complaint as the blows rained down upon her. I rushed into the yard, mad with indignation, straight at the drunken woman.
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