Treasury of Russian Short Stories 1900-1966

by Wassner, Selig O. ;

  Indeed, I had been expecting Klara and prepared her breakfast. While she was eating I quickly sat down at the easel and began drawing. I enjoyed drawing her because she was in fact a denizen of the morthern woods which I missed so much here.

  Klara finished her meal, flew up on my shoulder and again began whispering into my ear. Was she thanking me or trying to wheedle the soap dish away from me again? A moment later Klara hopped onto the chair in front of the easel, craned her neck, and began to study the drawing—first with one eye, then with the other, several times. Suddenly her feathers stood up, she knocked angrily against the easel with her wing, her tail began to shake furiously.

  “Grr-bage,” she swore. “Rr-rascal, rr-rot!”

  I felt hurt, stung by her criticism. “Why, Klara?” I asked. “Oh, go away, you know nothing of art.”

  “Rr-rascal!” Klara kept swearing. She hopped down from the chair and walked up to the soap dish. Then she gave me a serious look and uttered in a voice full of enthusiasm. “Gr-rreat!”

  As Klara began dragging the soap dish backwards, toward the balcony, I understood: she appreciated art in her own, different way. “Come on, Klara,” I said, smiling, “you’re right, it’s a beautiful soap dish, but I’m afraid I can’t give it to you. You see, I can’t walk around unshaven.”

  Klara flew away.

  I sat for a long time in front of the easel, studying the drawing. “No,” I scratched my head at last and sighed. “I’d better leave the South and go back to my woods.”

  My friendship with Klara continued, however. We became fond of each other, and I missed her if she didn’t show up in the morning. I felt lonely without her.

  One evening a violent storm set in. Huge waves rolled out with the roar of shooting cannons, breaking against the rocks on top of which our sanatorium was situated, making it tremble in its foundation. The rain was coming down heavily. The park below was humming with a hollow noise. Bolts of lightning constantly slithered through the murk above the sea, and the crashing of wind-broken windowpanes kept ringing through the sanatorium.

  I stood at the balcony door and watched the storm. Then a thought about Klara made me apprehensive. I was afraid she was having a hard time. When I went to bed, late, sleep wouldn’t come.

  Then I heard a knocking at the balcony door. I raised my head and listened. First it seemed like the wind clattering against the window, but the knocking persisted. It was a demanding kind of knocking. I jumped up, rushed to the door and opened it hastily. Together with the rain and wind that had broken into the room dashed in Klara. She was wet, ruffled, angry! She skidded several times on the floor, chattering!

  “Br-rr!”

  I laughed from joy, smoothed her wet feathers, trying to calm her. But Klara seemed too aroused, too angry. She was too chilled by the rain and wind, as she rattled her beak, walked from corner to corner, until at last, when I lay down, she perched on the headboard and dozed off. Only at a flash of lightning would she caw out in her sleep.

  In the morning I was wakened by the chambermaid who had come into my room and brought a kitten with her. The moment Klara saw it she jealously dashed up to the animal and pecked it on the head. The kitten meowed pitiously and scampered out, its ears pressed to its head.

  “Rr-rascal!” Klara chattered. “Ss-such rr-rascal!” Apparently she didn’t care for cats.

  I scolded my pet for her rudeness. But Klara quieted down only after she walked up to the soap dish. “Gr-reat!” she cawed.

  A few days later came my time to leave. In the morning Klara had her breakfast as usual, and kept begging me for the soap dish, affectionately pinching my ear. I sadly looked at my suitcases. I had been considering taking Klara with me but didn’t know how I could bring a bird to Moscow. Klara seemed to understand that I was leaving; she tried to overwhelm me with affection. She had had her breakfast, but instead of leaving, as usual, she clambered onto my head, beakcombed my hair. I took her onto my hand, and for the first time, I noticed how fast her heart beat. “So long, Klara,” I said, setting her in front of me on the table, “I’ve got to leave.”

  “Ss-sad,” Klara said, tenderly pressing my finger with her beak. “Ss-sad!”

  I was moved. “You want to go with me?” I asked. “Want to go North?”

  Klara made no reply.

  I sighed, picked up my suitcases, then remembered something. I got out my soap dish and a pair of old cufflinks and left them on the balcony.

  Klara hadn’t budged. She sat beside the suitcases, watching me with her wise, black eyes.

  “Well,” I said, “your understanding of art is one-sided. Take the things out there, they’re yours.”

  I came down the staircase, into the vestibule. Klara followed me, hop, hop, one step at a time.

  At the door the kitten was about to join me but an angry look from Klara made it flinch and break away in fear.

  I stroked Klara for the last time before getting into the bus. She flew up onto a palm tree and watched me in silence.

  “So long, Klara,” I said, waving goodbye before turning away.

  “Ss-so rr-rong!” Klara replied.

  Later other passengers told me that Klara had been flying behind the bus for quite some time, cawing and cawing. …

  1966

  The House Guest

  by Anatoli Rubinov

  Anatoli Zakharovitch Rubinov, born 1934 and graduated from the Moscow POLygraph Institute in 1958. Worked with many newspapers and presently employed with Literaturnaya Gazeta. Published a book Friends Are Everywhere in 1959, as well as a number of short stories in various magazines.

  The door opened and there she stood—a young woman in a long housecoat with a Turkish towel carelessly wrapped around her head.

  “Valentina Ivanovna?” she repeated. “That’s me.”

  Her admission was indecisive. She gave him a baffled look while her hands holding up the lapels of her housecoat cautiously rested on her throat.

  “I’m a friend of Georgi Bakanov,” Andrey hastily got out an unsealed envelope from his pocket. “Here’s a letter from him. For you …”

  She seemed taller and prettier than the way he had pictured her from his friend’s description. It made him a little bashful.

  The woman took the envelope and began reading. “But why am I keeping you on the porch?” she suddenly exclaimed. “Come on in.”

  With an eager hustle she took his suitcase, put it in a corner, then took his overcoat. “Take a shower, please, don’t be bashful. Then we’ll have tea …”

  While Andrey washed, Valentina Ivanovna changed, made tea, and set the table. Tall, statuesque, she moved lightly about the room. Later, watching him from across the table, she kept pelting him with questions.

  “Did he get his degree?”

  “Yes. Now Georgi is not only doing an engineer’s job, he’s a real one.”

  “Oh, how happy I am for him. You cannot imagine. He’s quite a fellow.”

  Andrey could readily see the happiness sparkling in her huge greyish-green eyes.

  “But why hasn’t he written me? I was so worried. But tell me, did he get a flat?”

  “That worked out all right, too. He’s got two rooms now. Plenty of space for the three of them.”

  “The three?” Valentina Ivanovna’s question came after a moment of silence.

  Andrey blushed. He knew he had blabbed. She walked away to the dressing table and lifted her hands to her hair with a slow, tired motion. Her back was turned, but he could see her face in the mirror. She sighed—a repressed kind of sigh, and her fingers pensively kneaded her squeaking, humid hair.

  “Why do people lie to each other so often and so much?” she asked in a low voice without turning around, as if talking to herself. “Is it because of cowardice or just convenience? Nothing destroys hope like lying …”

  Gripped by a sensation of desperate awkwardness, Andrey realized he had involuntarily become a witness to someone else’s secret and someone else’s grief. Only n
ow did he begin to recognize the sarcasm in Georgi’s words as he had handed him the letter for Valentina Ivanovna: “Don’t be bashful, she’ll put you up. She’s kind …”

  She willingly consented to have Andrey live in her flat for about a week as Georgi Bakanov asked in his letter, since he had no friends in Moscow, and to get a room in a hotel in the summer was well-nigh impossible. Andrey thought he somehow had to reciprocate unobtrusively for her candor and friendliness but his shyness and tact muddled his thinking. Should he offer her money? From the surroundings he saw that she lived modestly (that phonograph creaking with age!). No, that might quite offend her. Should he bring food for dinner? That made even less sense. He decided to invite her to the movies—like all Muscovites she probably seldom went to movies or museums.

  Under a pretense Andrey went downtown, window-shopped a little, all the time wondering about her. At last he came hurrying home, full of determination.

  “I got two tickets to the movies. Would you like to go with me, Valentina Ivanovna?”

  “I’ll be glad to,” she said simply, without hesitation.

  “Let’s hurry,” he said, afraid she’d change her mind. “We’ll be late.”

  They returned home late. The humping crest of the Bolshoi Kamennoi Bridge was almost deserted. At rare intervals a trolley car would speed by like a demon sputtering bluish sparks. It was a warm evening though a cool breeze came up from the river. Hanging between the shores above the water the darkness, pierced by lamp lights, seemed volatile and somehow transparent, as if with a stronger breeze it would evanesce like a dark mist.

  To the left somewhere far away and high glowed the lights of the university building, towering above the river. From the Alexandrow Park wafted a faint aroma of poplars.

  Andrey inhaled with pleasure the redolence which made him slightly dizzy. Gingerly he held Valentina’s arm without feeling at all awkward about it.

  “I’ve travelled through a lot of towns,” he said, pressing her elbow a little harder, “and everywhere I either liked the place or disliked it depending on how people treated me and how comfortable I felt there.”

  Valentina Ivanovna turned her head and look at him intensely.

  “It’s true,” he assured her ardently. “Take another town. It looks beautiful, all in flowers, music in all the parks, but you’re alone and homeless. Often hotels have no room and with no friends you end up by sleeping in an office on some slippery couch or in the waiting room of a railroad station.”

  “Really?” Valentina Ivanovna found it hard to believe. “I always thought, knock at any door and they’ll take you in.”

  “If it were only like that!” Andrey laughed, amused at her naiveté. “But Moscow is different,” he added. “I like it very much here. I’m at home here.”

  At home she made his bed on the couch. Sleep didn’t come, however. Objects began to stand out in the darkness; the cupboard, then the screen behind which was Valentina Ivanovna’s bed. From time to time the room suddenly glowed up with a restless moving light—of cars going by. The illuminated square of the window dissected by the frame would first fall with an arched angle onto the ceiling and part of the wall, then rush through the room and merge with the shadows on the opposite side. For a flashing moment the mirror would flare up and the varnished cupboard shimmer eerily.

  It seemed Valentina Ivanovna wasn’t asleep either. Her breathing was heavy—she might have been crying.

  The following days went by quickly. As long as his hostess was at work, Andrey spent his time at the Exposition, at the Tretyakov Gallery, and even foraged a ticket for the Armory show. In the evenings, though, they went to the movies, then stopped for ice cream. She began to perk up and often smiling sadly she’d tell him willingly about herself. He’d not interrupt although her story might have been familiar here and there from Georgi. Georgi’s name was never mentioned again—as if it didn’t exist.

  Valentina Ivanovna’s personal story wasn’t a happy one, as it often is with pretty and sensible women. Destiny had seemed to have plenty of fortune in store for her, but luck never came. She had been employed as a telephone operator in the Central Telegraph office when she married a superintendent at the Kuzminski construction works. Her girlfriends had been envious and she too had been proud of herself and of her pick. But soon enough, to her horror, she found out that her husband was an alcoholic.

  He’d come home late, his attractive features spread into an ugly mask, his lower lip drooping, his eyes turned into two hazy little buttons, frightening, as if unseeing. He’d not undress but sit down sidewise at the table and try to prop his chin on his elbow, and his hand would keep slipping off and knock against the corner of the table. “Why’re ya grinning?” he’d yell at her in rage. “Why’re ya so happy? Just wait’n I’ll leave ya. Yah. Or chase ya out. Just stamp ma foot ’n out you go. ‘N get lost—what’ll ya do then, huh?”

  What would often follow was drunk raving: what an excellent worker he was, how the management was eating from his hand and how he was pulling strings at his will. He’d interrupt his raving from time to time, scream insults at her, curse and rebuke her.

  For a year or so she had tried to save her marriage. She’d patiently try to convince her husband to “get hold of himself and be a man.” To no avail. Finally she had decided to leave him. He, too, had disappeared then. Shortly thereafter she had given birth to a baby girl who became her only solace in life. However, pneumonia took the child away. Valentina was alone in the world when she had met Georgi Bakanov …

  Full of sympathetic understanding, Andrey listened attentively, his eyes glued on the young woman. How painfully he would have loved to do something to make her life easier and happier. But what? How can one relieve such grief?

  He excused himself, put on his coat and hurried out before she had time to ask where and why he was going. Half an hour later he came running back into the flat, eager and puffing, with a cake and bouquet, or rather, an armful of bright aromatic flowers.

  Sternly knitting her brows and disapprovingly shaking her head, Valentina Ivanvona said, “You won’t have anything left to go home with. You’re crazy.”

  Still her eyes sparkled with joy and the corner of her mouth rose to a smile. “Where shall I put them?” Unexpectedly she kissed him on the forehead. “Thank you,” she whispered.

  She began bustling with the flowers. Two vases and a pitcher came out of the cupboard, but there were so many flowers that some of them were simply left on the table. The room filled with a thick, intoxicating aroma.

  On the eve of his departure they stayed home. There was a long silence as the two of them sat on the couch. Valentina watched the darkness thicken, fearful yet helpless to get up and turn on the light. Sitting beside this man, really a stranger, she felt comfortable and yet uneasy. He seemed shy, still he was attentive. Sitting farther from the window, she could see his profile, watch him hold his breath. His hand excitedly caressed hers and lifted it gingerly to his lips. She let him.

  A car went by and the square of light flitted through the room and glided along the two of them, showing fear and expectation in her humid eyes. Assisted by a spurt of determination she rose. “Excuse me, please. I think I left the gas on,” she said, leaving the room.

  The first day he came home, Andrey met Georgi Bakanov.

  “Well, what’s new, Andryusha? Satisfied?” Georgi’s questioning look was full of gay suspicion.

  “Yeah, everything is all right,” Andrey didn’t feel like talking.

  “I mean Valentina. Come on tell me how she received you. Did she ask about me? She’s great, though, isn’t she? And kind. Most important, she’s kind …”

  They had been sitting in the lunchroom. Colleagues from the construction office came to their table. In the welcome hullabaloo, answering questions about his trip and Moscow, Andrey hadn’t noticed the innuendo at first. When he did he blushed.

  He’d thought of a riposte when Georgi concluded, “On the other hand, all broads�
��re the same. Knew it all the time. Andrey, you’re as quick as they come …”

  For a moment Andrey remained stupefied. A weak smile came to his face, as if brought on by embarassment or guilt. Georgi couldn’t make it out; he attributed it to discretion.

  Without realizing it, Andrey couldn’t stop thinking of Valentina—he often caught himself doing so. Those bluish sparks of the trolley on the Bolshoi Kamennoi Bridge, the aroma of poplars from the Alexandrov Park, the reflection of lights in the water, and the floating framework square of the window. He remembered Moscow as a huge beautiful world in whose center was Valentina Ivanovna. Here and there, everything around him was full of Valentina. He’d have to write her, no ifs or buts—such an acquaintance must not slip into oblivion.

  Entering the office next morning, he met Georgi. With him was a new colleague, Oleg, a young fellow just graduated from the institute who got Moscow as his first assignment. Georgi was heatedly trying to convince Oleg about something. He called for Andrey’s assistance.

  “Well, tell him, Andryusha, don’t be bashful. Isn’t it true? Take your suitcase direct to Starokonyushenny, get out at the Kropotkinskaya Metro station and it’s right there. She’s a great woman! And very, very kind,” Georgi winked knowingly at Andrey.

  Oleg blushed slightly, then uttered a loud, stupid laugh.

  And then it happened: the stooping, narrow-shouldered Andrey unswervingly shot a fist out upward and hit Georgi on the face with all its might. Andrey wanted to reinforce his act by words, but on second thought he shot out his left fist and hit again, even harder.