After bathing, the ladies dressed and went off together.
‘‘I have a fever every other day, and yet I don’t get thinner,’’ Nadezhda Fyodorovna said, licking her lips, which were salty from bathing, and responding with smiles to the bows of acquaintances. ‘‘I’ve always been plump, and now it seems I’m plumper still.’’
‘‘That, darling, is a matter of disposition. If someone is not disposed to plumpness, like me, for instance, no sort of food will help. But darling, you’ve got your hat all wet.’’
‘‘Never mind, it will dry.’’
Nadezhda Fyodorovna again saw people in white walking on the embankment and talking in French; and for some reason, joy again stirred in her breast, and she vaguely remembered some great hall in which she had once danced, or of which, perhaps, she had once dreamed. And something in the very depths of her soul vaguely and dully whispered to her that she was a petty, trite, trashy, worthless woman...
Marya Konstantinovna stopped at her gate and invited her to come in for a moment.
‘‘Come in, my dear!’’ she said in a pleading voice, at the same time looking at Nadezhda Fyodorovna with anguish and hope: maybe she’ll refuse and not come in!
‘‘With pleasure,’’ Nadezhda Fyodorovna accepted. ‘‘You know how I love calling on you!’’
And she went into the house. Marya Konstantinovna seated her, gave her coffee, offered her some sweet rolls, then showed her photographs of her former charges, the young Garatynsky ladies, who were all married now, and also showed her Katya’s and Kostya’s grades at the examinations; the grades were very good, but to make them look still better, she sighed and complained about how difficult it was now to study in high school... She attended to her visitor, and at the same time pitied her, and suffered from the thought that Nadezhda Fyodorovna, by her presence, might have a bad influence on Katya’s and Kostya’s morals, and she was glad that her Nikodim Alexandrych was not at home. Since, in her opinion, all men liked ‘‘such women,’’ Nadezhda Fyodorovna might have a bad influence on Nikodim Alexandrych as well.
As she talked with her visitor, Marya Konstantinovna remembered all the while that there was to be a picnic that evening and that von Koren had insistently asked that the macaques—that is, Laevsky and Nadezhda Fyodorovna—not be told about it, but she accidentally let it slip, turned all red, and said in confusion:
‘‘I hope you’ll be there, too!’’
VI
THE ARRANGEMENT WAS to go seven miles out of town on the road to the south, stop by the dukhan14 at the confluence of the two rivers—the Black and the Yellow—and cook fish soup there. They set out shortly after five. At the head of them all, in a charabanc, rode Samoilenko and Laevsky; after them, in a carriage drawn by a troika, came Marya Konstantinovna, Nadezhda Fyodorovna, Katya, and Kostya; with them came a basket of provisions and dishes. In the next equipage rode the police chief Kirilin and the young Atchmianov, the son of that same merchant Atchmianov to whom Nadezhda Fyodorovna owed three hundred roubles, and on a little stool facing them, his legs tucked under, sat Nikodim Alexandrych, small, neat, with his hair brushed forward. Behind them all rode von Koren and the deacon; at the deacon’s feet was a basket of fish.
‘‘Keep r-r-right!’’ Samoilenko shouted at the top of his lungs whenever they met a native cart or an Abkhazian riding a donkey.
‘‘In two years, when I have the means and the people ready, I’ll go on an expedition,’’ von Koren was telling the deacon. ‘‘I’ll follow the coast from Vladivostok to the Bering Straits and then from the Straits to the mouth of the Yenisei. We’ll draw a map, study the flora and fauna, and undertake thorough geological, anthropological, and ethnographic investigations. Whether you come with me or not is up to you.’’
‘‘It’s impossible,’’ said the deacon.
‘‘Why?’’
‘‘I’m attached, a family man.’’
‘‘The deaconess will let you go. We’ll provide for her. It would be still better if you persuaded her, for the common good, to be tonsured a nun; that would also enable you to be tonsured and join the expedition as a hieromonk.15 I could arrange it for you.’’
The deacon was silent.
‘‘Do you know your theology well?’’ asked the zoologist.
‘‘Poorly.’’
‘Hm... I can’t give you any guidance in that regard, because I have little acquaintance with theology. Give me a list of the books you need, and I’ll send them to you from Petersburg in the winter. You’ll also have to read the notes of clerical travelers: you sometimes find good ethnographers and connoisseurs of Oriental languages among them. When you’ve familiarized yourself with their manner, it will be easier for you to set to work. Well, and while there are no books, don’t waste time, come to me, and we’ll study the compass, go through some meteorology. It’s all much needed.’’
‘‘Maybe so ...’ the deacon murmured and laughed. ‘‘I’ve asked for a post in central Russia, and my uncle the archpriest has promised to help me in that. If I go with you, it will turn out that I’ve bothered him for nothing.’’
‘‘I don’t understand your hesitation. If you go on being an ordinary deacon, who only has to serve on feast days and rests from work all the other days, even after ten years you’ll still be the same as you are now; the only addition will be a mustache and a little beard, whereas if you come back from an expedition after the same ten years, you’ll be a different man, enriched by the awareness of having accomplished something.’’
Cries of terror and delight came from the ladies’ carriage. The carriages were driving along a road carved into the sheer cliff of the rocky coast, and it seemed to them all that they were riding on a shelf attached to a high wall, and that the carriages were about to fall into the abyss. To the right spread the sea, to the left an uneven brown wall with black spots, red veins, and creeping roots, and above, bending over as if with fear and curiosity, curly evergreens looked down. A minute later, there were shrieks and laughter again: they had to drive under an enormous overhanging rock.
‘‘I don’t understand why the devil I’m coming with you,’’ said Laevsky. ‘‘How stupid and banal! I need to go north, to escape, to save myself, and for some reason I’m going on this foolish picnic.’’
‘‘But just look at this panorama!’’ Samoilenko said to him as the horses turned left, and the valley of the Yellow River came into view, and the river itself glistened—yellow, turbid, mad...
‘‘I don’t see anything good in it, Sasha,’’ replied Laevsky. ‘‘To constantly go into raptures over nature is to show the paucity of your imagination. All these brooks and cliffs are nothing but trash compared to what my imagination can give me.’’
The carriages were now driving along the riverbank. The high, mountainous banks gradually converged, the valley narrowed, and ahead was what looked like a gorge; the stony mountain they were driving along had been knocked together by nature out of huge stones, which crushed each other with such terrible force that Samoilenko involuntarily grunted each time he looked at them. The somber and beautiful mountain was cut in places by narrow crevices and gorges that breathed dampness and mysteriousness on the travelers; through the gorges, other mountains could be seen, brown, pink, purple, smoky, or flooded with bright light. From time to time, as they drove past the gorges, they could hear water falling from a height somewhere and splashing against the rocks.
‘‘Ah, cursed mountains,’’ sighed Laevsky, ‘‘I’m so sick of them!’’
At the place where the Black River fell into the Yellow River and its water, black as ink, dirtied the yellow water and struggled with it, the Tartar Kerbalai’s dukhan stood by the side of the road, with a Russian flag on the roof and a sign written in chalk: ‘‘The Pleasant Dukhan.’’ Next to it was a small garden surrounded by a wattle fence, where tables and benches stood, and a single cypress, beautiful and somber, towered over the pitiful thorny bushes.
Kerbalai, a small, nimble Tartar i
n a blue shirt and white apron, stood in the road and, holding his stomach, bowed low to the approaching carriages and, smiling, showed his gleaming white teeth.
‘‘Greetings, Kerbalaika!’’ Samoilenko called out to him. ‘‘We’ll drive on a little further, and you bring us a samovar and some chairs! Step lively!’’
Kerbalai kept nodding his cropped head and muttering something, and only those sitting in the last carriage could hear clearly: ‘‘There are trout, Your Excellency!’’
‘‘Bring them, bring them!’’ von Koren said to him.
Having driven some five hundred paces past the dukhan, the carriages stopped. Samoilenko chose a small meadow strewn with stones suitable for sitting on, and where a tree brought down by a storm lay with torn-up, shaggy roots and dry yellow needles. A flimsy log bridge had been thrown across the river at this spot, and on the other bank, just opposite, a shed for drying corn stood on four short pilings, looking like the fairy-tale hut on chicken’s legs.16 A ladder led down from its doorway.
The first impression everyone had was that they would never get out of there. On all sides, wherever one looked, towering mountains loomed up, and the evening shadow was approaching quickly, quickly, from the direction of the dukhan and the somber cypress, and that made the narrow, curved valley of the Black River seem narrower and the mountains higher. One could hear the murmuring of the river and the constant trilling of cicadas.
‘‘Charming!’’ said Marya Konstantinovna, inhaling deeply with rapture. ‘‘Children, see how good it is! What silence!’’
‘‘Yes, it is good, in fact,’’ agreed Laevsky, who liked the view and, for some reason, when he looked at the sky and then at the blue smoke coming from the chimney of the dukhan, suddenly grew sad. ‘‘Yes, it’s good!’’ he repeated.
‘‘Ivan Andreich, describe this view!’’ Marya Konstantinovna said tearfully.
‘‘What for?’’ asked Laevsky. ‘‘The impression is better than any description. When writers babble about this wealth of colors and sounds that we all receive from nature by way of impressions, they make it ugly and unrecognizable.’’
‘‘Do they?’’ von Koren asked coldly, choosing for himself the biggest stone by the water and trying to climb up and sit on it. ‘‘Do they?’’ he repeated, staring fixedly at Laevsky. ‘‘And Romeo and Juliet? And Pushkin’s Ukrainian night,17 for instance? Nature should come and bow down at its feet.’’
‘Perhaps ...’ agreed Laevsky, too lazy to reason and object. ‘‘However,’’ he said a little later, ‘‘what are Romeo and Juliet essentially? A beautiful, poetic, sacred love—roses under which they want to hide the rot. Romeo is the same animal as everyone else.’’
‘‘Whatever one talks with you about, you always bring it all down to...’
Von Koren looked at Katya and did not finish.
‘‘What do I bring it down to?’’ asked Laevsky.
‘‘Somebody says to you, for instance, ‘How beautiful is a bunch of grapes!’ and you say, ‘Yes, but how ugly when it’s chewed and digested in the stomach.’ Why say that? It’s not new and ... generally, it’s a strange manner you have.’’
Laevsky knew that von Koren did not like him, and he was therefore afraid of him and felt in his presence as if they were all crowded together and somebody was standing behind his back. He said nothing in reply, walked away, and regretted that he had come.
‘‘Gentlemen, off you go to fetch brush for the fire!’’ commanded Samoilenko.
They all wandered off at random, and the only ones who stayed put were Kirilin, Atchmianov, and Nikodim Alexandrych. Kerbalai brought chairs, spread a rug on the ground, and set down several bottles of wine. The police chief, Kirilin, a tall, imposing man who wore an overcoat over his tunic in all weather, with his haughty bearing, pompous stride, and thick, somewhat rasping voice, resembled all provincial police chiefs of the younger generation. His expression was sad and sleepy, as though he had just been awakened against his wishes.
‘‘What is this you’ve brought, you brute?’’ he asked Kerbalai, slowly enunciating each word. ‘‘I told you to serve Kvareli, and what have you brought, you Tartar mug? Eh? What?’’
‘‘We have a lot of wine of our own, Egor Alexeich,’’ Nikodim Alexandrych observed timidly and politely.
‘‘What, sir? But I want my wine to be there, too. I’m taking part in the picnic, and I presume I have every right to contribute my share. I pre-sume! Bring ten bottles of Kvareli!’’
‘‘Why so many?’’ Nikodim Alexandrych, who knew that Kirilin had no money, was surprised.
‘‘Twenty bottles! Thirty!’’ cried Kirilin.
‘‘Never mind, let him!’’ Atchmianov whispered to Nikodim Alexandrych. ‘‘I’ll pay.’’
Nadezhda Fyodorovna was in a gay, mischievous mood. She wanted to leap, laugh, exclaim, tease, flirt. In her cheap calico dress with blue flecks, red shoes, and the same straw hat, it seemed to her that she was small, simple, light and airy as a butterfly. She ran out on the flimsy bridge and looked into the water for a moment to make herself dizzy, then cried out and, laughing, ran across to the drying shed, and it seemed to her that all the men, even Kerbalai, admired her. When, in the swiftly falling darkness, the trees were merging with the mountains, the horses with the carriages, and a little light shone in the windows of the dukhan, she climbed a path that wound up the mountainside between the stones and thorny bushes and sat on a stone. Below, the fire was already burning. Near the fire, the deacon moved with rolled-up sleeves, and his long black shadow circled radius-like around the flames. He kept putting on more brush and stirring the pot with a spoon tied to a long stick. Samoilenko, with a copper-red face, bustled about the fire as in his own kitchen and shouted fiercely:
‘‘Where’s the salt, gentlemen? Did you forget it? Why are you all sitting around like landowners, and I’m the only one bustling about?’’
Laevsky and Nikodim Alexandrych sat next to each other on the fallen tree and gazed pensively at the fire. Marya Konstantinovna, Katya, and Kostya were taking the tea service and plates out of the baskets. Von Koren, his arms crossed and one foot placed on a stone, stood on the bank just beside the water and thought about something. Red patches from the fire, together with shadows, moved on the ground near the dark human figures, trembled on the mountainside, on the trees, on the bridge, on the drying shed; on the other side, the steep, eroded bank was all lit up, flickered, and was reflected in the river, and the swift-running, turbulent water tore its reflection to pieces.
The deacon went for the fish, which Kerbalai was cleaning and washing on the bank, but halfway there, he stopped and looked around.
‘‘My God, how good!’’ he thought. ‘‘The people, the stones, the fire, the twilight, the ugly tree—nothing more, but how good!’’
On the far bank, by the drying shed, some unknown people appeared. Because the light flickered and the smoke from the fire was carried to the other side, it was impossible to make out these people all at once, but they caught glimpses now of a shaggy hat and a gray beard, now of a blue shirt, now of rags hanging from shoulders to knees and a dagger across the stomach, now of a swarthy young face with black brows, as thick and bold as if they had been drawn with charcoal. About five of them sat down on the ground in a circle, while the other five went to the drying shed. One stood in the doorway with his back to the fire and, putting his hands behind him, began telling something that must have been very interesting, because, when Samoilenko added more brush and the fire blazed up, spraying sparks and brightly illuminating the drying barn, two physiognomies could be seen looking out the door, calm, expressing deep attention, and the ones sitting in a circle also turned and began listening to the story. A little later, the ones sitting in a circle began softly singing something drawn-out, melodious, like church singing during Lent... Listening to them, the deacon imagined how it would be with him in ten years, when he came back from the expedition: a young hieromonk, a missionary, an author with a name a
nd a splendid past; he is ordained archimandrite, then bishop; he serves the liturgy in a cathedral; in a golden mitre with a panagia, he comes out to the ambo and, blessing the mass of people with the trikíri and dikíri, proclaims: ‘‘Look down from heaven, O God, and behold and visit this vineyard which Thy right hand hath planted!’’ And the children’s angelic voices sing in response: ‘‘Holy God...’18
‘‘Where’s the fish, Deacon?’’ Samoilenko’s voice rang out.
Returning to the fire, the deacon imagined a procession with the cross going down a dusty road on a hot July day; at the head the muzhiks carry banners, and the women and girls icons; after them come choirboys and a beadle with a bandaged cheek and straw in his hair; then, in due order,
himself, the deacon, after him a priest in a skull cap and with a cross, and behind them, raising dust, comes a crowd of muzhiks, women, boys; there, in the crowd, are the priest’s wife and the deaconess, with kerchiefs on their heads. The choir sings, babies howl, quails call, a lark pours out its song... Now they stop and sprinkle a herd with holy water... Go further, and on bended knee pray for rain. Then a bite to eat, conversation...
‘‘And that, too, is good ...’ thought the deacon.
VII
KIRILIN AND ATCHMIANOV were climbing the path up the mountainside. Atchmianov lagged behind and stopped, and Kirilin came up to Nadezhda Fyodorovna.
‘‘Good evening!’’ he said, saluting her.
‘‘Good evening.’’
‘‘Yes, ma’am!’’ Kirilin said, looking up at the sky and thinking.
‘‘Why ‘Yes, ma’am’?’’ asked Nadezhda Fyodorovna after some silence, and noticed that Atchmianov was watching the two of them.
‘‘And so,’’ the officer pronounced slowly, ‘‘our love withered away before it had time to flower, so to speak. How am I to understand that? Is it coquetry on your part, or do you regard me as a scapegrace with whom you can act however you please?’’
The Complete Short Novels Page 18