Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida (Penguin Classics)

by Chandler, Robert

  ‘I don’t know.’

  She was silent for a long time. Some imitator of Charlie Chaplin kept running stupidly about the screen, his bowler hat cocked to one side and his feet splayed out in shoes that were down-at-heel and far too large for him.

  ‘Yes, you must feel very lonely,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, and what can I do but be patient? Patience – médecine des pauvres.’9

  ‘A very sad medicine.’

  ‘It is indeed. So very sad,’ he went on with a slight smile, ‘that I’ve sometimes even glanced at Illustrated Russia – there’s a section, you know, where they print little personal notices like: “Young Russian woman from Latvia feels lonely and would like to correspond with sensitive Russian Parisian. Please include photograph.” Or “Serious lady, auburn hair, unsophisticated but sympathique, widowed with 9-year-old son, wishes to correspond, serious intentions, with sober gentleman at least 40, financially secure, employed as chauffeur or similar, enjoys home comforts. Intellectual interests not essential.” I quite understand her – they really aren’t essential.’

  ‘But don’t you have friends and acquaintances?’

  ‘I have no close friends. And acquaintances are poor comfort.’

  ‘Who keeps house for you?’

  ‘There’s not a lot of housekeeping to do. I make my morning coffee myself, and I make lunch myself. A femme de ménage10 comes in the evening.’

  ‘You poor thing,’ she said, squeezing his hand.

  And they sat like this for a long time, hand in hand, united by the gloom and the closeness of their seats, pretending to be watching a screen towards which, up above their heads, a beam of smoky, chalkyblue light was being shone from a little cabin on the back wall. The Chaplin imitator, whose battered bowler had risen off his head in horror, was hurtling, in the remains of an antediluvian automobile with a smoking samovar chimney for an exhaust pipe, straight at a telegraph pole. The loudspeaker let out a variety of musical roars while the smoke-filled pit down below – they themselves were in the balcony – resounded with thunderous applause and desperately joyous laughter. He leant over towards her:

  ‘You know what? Why don’t we go somewhere like Montparnasse? It’s terribly boring here and there’s no air.’

  She nodded her head and began pulling on her gloves.

  After sitting down again in a half-dark cab and looking at the windows – which were sparkling from the rain, flaring up from time to time like diamonds of different colours in the glow of street lamps or the reflections, now blood, now quicksilver, of advertisements up in the black height – he again turned down the cuff of her glove and gave her a long kiss on the hand. Her eyes too were strangely sparkling, their lashes thick and black as coal, as she sadly and tenderly leaned over towards him, till he could taste the sweetness of lipstick on her full lips.

  At La Coupole they started with oysters and Anjou, then ordered partridge and claret. By the time they came to coffee and yellow chartreuse, they both felt a little tipsy. They smoked a lot; the ashtray was full of her blood-red cigarette-ends. As they talked, he looked at her flushed face and thought that she was quite a beauty.

  ‘But tell me the truth,’ she said, picking tiny crumbs of tobacco off the tip of her tongue. ‘You must have met some women during these years.’

  ‘Yes. But you can guess what kind… Nights in hotels… And you?’

  She was silent for a moment. ‘There was one very painful story… No, I don’t want to talk about it. A boy, a pimp really… But how did you and your wife separate?’

  ‘I’m ashamed to say. She met a boy too – a handsome young Greek, extremely rich. And after a month or two there was nothing left of that pure, touching young girl who had worshipped the White Army and all of us in it. She began dining with him in the most expensive bar in Pera and he would send her enormous baskets of flowers. “I don’t understand. Surely you’re not jealous, are you? You’re busy all day long – and I have such fun with him. As far as I’m concerned, he’s just a sweet boy – and nothing more.” A sweet boy! And she was only twenty herself. It wasn’t easy to forget her, to forget the girl I’d known back in Yekaterinodar.’

  When the bill came, she checked carefully through it and told him not to leave more than ten per cent as a tip. After that, the thought of saying goodbye in half an hour seemed stranger still – to both of them.

  ‘Let’s go to my apartment,’ he said sadly. ‘We can sit and talk a bit longer…’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ she said, taking his arm and pressing it to her side.

  A night taxi with a Russian driver took them to a lonely little sidestreet, stopping in front of a tall building beside which, in the metallic light of a gas lamp, light rain was falling onto a rubbish bin. They entered a suddenly bright hall, squeezed into the small lift, and went slowly up, embracing and quietly kissing one another. He managed to get the key into the lock of his front door before the corridor light cut out and led her first into a lobby, then into a small dining room where only one bulb lit up in the chandelier, shining bleakly. Their faces were already tired. He offered her more wine.

  ‘No, my dear,’ she said. ‘I can’t drink any more.’

  He asked her again. ‘Just a glass of white wine each. I’ve got some excellent Pouilly Fumé on the window ledge.’

  ‘You drink, my dear, but I’m going to wash and undress. And to bed, to bed. We’re not children and I’m sure you knew very well, when I agreed to come back with you… And anyway, why shouldn’t we stay together?’

  Too overcome to answer, he quietly led her into the bedroom; from there an open door led into the bathroom and he turned on the lights in both rooms. These lights were bright, it was warm from the radiators and the rain was drumming quickly and evenly against the roof. She immediately began to pull her long dress over her head.

  He went out, drank two glasses of sharp, icy wine one after the other and, unable to wait any longer, went back into the bedroom. Opposite him, reflected in a large mirror on the wall, he could see the brightly lit bathroom. She was standing with her back to him, naked, white and strong, leaning over the basin and washing her neck and her breasts.

  ‘No – keep out!’ she said, and, throwing on a dressing gown yet not covering her full breasts, her strong white stomach or her taut white hips, she went up to him and embraced him as if she were his wife. And, as if she were his wife, he embraced her, all her cool body, kissing her still damp breasts that smelled of soap, her eyes, her lips from which she had wiped off the lipstick.

  Two days later she left her job and moved in with him.

  One day in winter he persuaded her to put all the money he had earned into a safe-deposit box in her own name at the Crédit Lyonnais. ‘Just to be on the safe side,’ he explained. ‘L’amour fait danser les ânes,11 and I feel as if I’m twenty. But anything can happen…’

  On the Tuesday before Easter he died in a carriage on the metro. As he was reading a newspaper, his eyes rolled back in his head and he slumped back against the seat…

  As she returned in her mourning dress from the cemetery, it was a lovely spring day, spring clouds were floating here and there in a soft Paris sky and everything spoke of young, eternal life – and of how her own life was now finished.

  Back at home, she began to tidy up the apartment. In the corridor, in a wall-cupboard, she found his old summer greatcoat, grey with a red lining. She took it off the peg, pressed it against her face and, still hugging it, sat down on the ground, her whole body convulsed by sobs, crying out, pleading with someone for mercy.

  First published in 1942

  Translated by Robert Chandler

  TEFFI (Nadezhda Aleksandrovna Lokhvitskaya, 1872–1952)

  Teffi was born in St Petersburg into a distinguished family that treasured literature; she and her three sisters all became writers. Her elder sister was considered a leading poet of the age, and both her younger sisters published articles in periodicals and had plays performed in theatres. Soon after the b
eginning of her career, in the early 1900s, she began to write under the name ‘Teffi’; although this is sometimes thought to come from the English ‘Taffy’, she herself, in her story ‘Pseudonym’, says it derives from ‘Steffi’, a familiar form of ‘Stepan’ – the name of a friend. After the Russian Revolution, Teffi settled in Paris. There she played a prominent role in literary life, organizing a salon and, with impressive regularity, contributing weekly columns and stories to leading periodicals for the next twenty years.

  During the course of her life she wrote in a variety of styles and genres: political feuilletons published in the Bolshevik newspaper New Life (Novaya Zhizn) during her brief period of radical fervour after the 1905 Revolution; Symbolist poems that she declaimed or sang in the most important Petersburg literary salons; popular one-act plays, mainly satirical treatments of topical subjects – one was entitled The Woman Question; and a novel entitled simply Adventure Novel (1930). Her finest works, however, are her short stories and her Memoirs (1928–9), a witty, thoughtful yet tragic account of her last months in Russia before emigrating in 1919.

  As well as being admired by writers of the stature of Bunin, Bulgakov and Zoshchenko, Teffi was hugely popular throughout her life. In pre-Revolutionary Russia, candies and perfumes were named after her; after the Revolution, her stories were published and her plays performed throughout the Russian diaspora. Between her death and the first Soviet publication of her work in 1989, however, she was almost forgotten. This was probably for several reasons: because she was a woman; because she was considered ‘lightweight’ (critics noticed her humour more than her perceptiveness); and because some of her more than five hundred stories were obviously written in a hurry. Also, as I have said with regard to Bunin, there was a long period during which both Western and Soviet scholars paid little attention to émigré literature in general. Since the early 1990s Teffi has been ever more widely published.

  ‘Love’ is perhaps the finest of her stories about children; ‘A Family Journey’ is characteristic of her later work, as witty as it is sombre.

  LOVE

  It was during the wonderful days of my ninth spring – days that were long and saturated with life, full to the brim.

  Everything during these days was interesting, important and full of meaning. Things were new and people were wise; they knew an astonishing amount, and they were keeping their great dark secrets until some future date, I didn’t know when.

  The morning of each long day began joyfully: thousands of small rainbows in the soapy foam of the washing stand; a new brightly-coloured light dress; prayers before the icon, behind which the fresh willow branches were still green; tea on a terrace shaded by lemon trees that had been carried out from the orangery in their tubs; my elder sisters, black-browed and with long plaits of hair, still unsettled, only just back from boarding school for the holidays; the slap of washing-bats from the pond beyond the flower garden, where peasant women shouted to one another as they did their laundry; the languid clucking of hens behind a clump of young, still small-leaved lilac: everything was not only new and joyful in itself but was a promise of something still more new and joyful.

  And it was during this ninth spring that first love came into my life, that my first love came, passed by and went away – in all its fullness, with rapture and pain and disappointment, with all that is to be expected of any true love.

  Four peasant girls, Khodoska, Paraska, Pidorka and Khovra – all wearing coin necklaces, Ukrainian wraparound skirts and linen shirts with embroidered shoulders – were weeding the garden paths. They scraped and hacked at the fresh black earth with their spades, turning over thick oily sods and tearing away tenacious crackling little roots that were as thin as nerves.

  For hours on end, until I was called, I would stand and watch, and breathe in the heavy damp smell of the earth.

  Necklaces dangled and clinked, arms red from the first of the sun slid lightly and gaily up and down the spades’ wooden handles.

  And then, instead of Khovra, who was fair and stocky, with a thin red band round her head, I saw a new girl – tall and lissom, with narrow hips.

  ‘Hey, new girl, what’s your name?’ I asked.

  A dark head encircled by thick four-stranded plaits and with a narrow white parting down the centre, turned towards me, and dark mischievous eyes looked at me from beneath round eyebrows that met in the middle, and a merry red mouth smiled at me.

  ‘Ganka!’

  And her teeth gleamed – even, white and large.

  She said her name and laughed, and the other girls laughed, and I felt happy too.

  Ganka was astonishing! Why was she laughing? And why did she make me feel so good and happy? She was not as well dressed as smart Paraska, but her thick striped skirt was wound so deftly round her shapely hips, her red woollen sash gripped her waist so firmly and vibrantly and her bright green ribbon trembled so arrestingly by the collar of her shirt that it was hard to imagine anything prettier.

  I looked at her, and every turn of her pliant dark neck sang like a song in my soul. And her eyes flashed again, mischievous and teasing; they laughed, then looked away.

  I was astonished by Paraska, Khodoska and Pidorka – how could they keep their eyes off her and how did they dare to behave as if they were her equals? Were they blind? But then even she herself seemed to think she was no different from the others.

  I looked at her fixedly, mindlessly, as if I were dreaming.

  A faraway voice called my name. I knew I was being called to my music lesson, but I didn’t answer.

  I saw Mother going down a nearby avenue with two smart ladies I didn’t know. Mother called to me. I had to go and curtsy. One of the ladies lifted my face by the chin with her small hand, which was encased in a perfumed white glove. The lady was tender, white, all in lace; compared with her, Ganka seemed coarse and rough.

  ‘No, Ganka’s not nice.’

  I wandered quietly back to the house.

  The next morning I went out calmly, unconcernedly and cheerfully to see where they were weeding now.

  Those sweet dark eyes met me as affectionately and merrily as if nothing had happened, as if I had never betrayed them for a perfumed lady in lace. And again the singing music of the movements of her shapely body took over, began to enchant.

  The conversation at breakfast was about yesterday’s guest, Countess Mionchinskaya. My eldest brother was sincerely enraptured by her. He was straightforward and kind but, since he was being educated at the lycée, he felt it necessary to lisp and drawl and slightly drag his right foot as he walked.1 And, doubtless afraid that a summer deep in the country might erase these distinguishing marks of the dandy, he greatly surprised us younger brothers and sisters with his strange mannerisms.

  ‘The Countess is divi-i-inely beau-utiful!’ he said. ‘She was the reigning beau-ty of the se-ea-son.’

  The second brother, who was studying at the military academy, did not agree. ‘I don’t see anything special about her. She may put on airs, but she’s got the mitts of a peasant – the mitts of a baba who’s been soaking neckweed.’2

  The elder brother poured scorn over this: ‘Qu’est-ce que c’est mitt? Qu’est-ce que c’est baba? Qu’est-ce que c’est neckweed?’

  ‘But I’ll tell you who truly is a beauty,’ continued the second brother, ‘and that’s Ganka who works in the garden.’

  ‘Hah!’

  ‘She’s badly dressed, of course, but give her a lace gown and gloves and she’ll beat your countess hands down.’

  My heart started beating so fast I had to close my eyes.

  ‘How can you talk such rubbish?’ said my sister Vera, taking offence on the Countess’s behalf. ‘Ganka’s coarse, and she has bad manners. She probably eats fish with a knife.’

  I was in torment. It seemed as if something was about to be revealed, some secret of mine – but what this secret was I did not even know myself.

  That, I think we can say, has nothing to do with it, said the elde
r brother. ‘Helen of Troy didn’t have French governesses, and she ate fish with her fingers – not even with a knife – yet her renown as a great beauty is unchallenged. What’s the matter, Kishmish? Why have you gone so red?’

  ‘Kishmish’3 was my nickname. I answered in a trembling voice, ‘Leave me in peace. I’m not doing you any harm. But you… you’re always picking on me.’

  In the evening, lying on the sofa in the dark drawing room, I heard my mother in the hall; she was playing a piece I love, the cavatina from the opera Martha.4 There was something in the soft, tender melody that evoked in me the same singing languor I had seen in Ganka’s movements. And this sweet torment, and the music, and my sadness and happiness made me cry, burying my face in the cushion.

  It was a grey morning, and I was afraid it would rain and I wouldn’t be allowed out into the garden.

  I wasn’t allowed out.

  I sat down sadly at the piano and began playing exercises, stumbling each time in the same place.

  But late in the morning the sun came out and I raced into the garden.

  The girls had just thrown down their spades and sat down for their midday meal. They got out pots and jugs wrapped in cloths and began eating buckwheat kasha or milk curds. Ganka untied her little bundle, took out a thick slice of bread and a clove of garlic, rubbed the bread with the garlic and began to eat, shining her mischievous eyes at me.

  I took fright and went away. It was terrible that Ganka ate such filth. It was as if the garlic had pushed her away from me. She had become incomprehensible and alien. Better if she’d eaten fish with a knife.

  I remembered what my brother had said about Yelena the Beautiful,5 but this brought me no consolation and I plodded back to the house.

  Nanny6 was sitting by the back door, knitting a stocking and listening to the housekeeper.

  I heard the name ‘Ganka’ and froze. I knew from experience that if I went up to them they’d either send me away or stop talking.

  ‘She worked for the steward’s wife all winter. She’s a hardworking girl. But every evening – the steward’s wife began to notice – there was a soldier with her. The wife sent him on his way one evening and she sent him on his way a second evening – but she couldn’t send him packing every evening.’