“It’s easy to see you spend your whole life traveling! You’re remarkably well equipped!”
“I like housekeeping, and I like doing things properly,” Fyodor Dmitrich said complacently. “So what do you say, shall we do without light for a while?”
He didn’t want to see his companion just now, it would only distract him. And that burning inside him … no, he didn’t want more light.
In the subdued, warm crimson glow from the vents in the samovar everything on the table—glasses, spoons, fingers—was easily distinguishable. It was as if the little flames glowed with his own heat, and her spirit seemed to hover in the impenetrable darkness overhead.
Once more, the colonel was agreeable. He fumbled his contribution onto the table—the usual train traveler’s share-and-share-alike. It’s tastier between two. Mmm—this jam of yours! What big cherries! … Don cherries … cherries are our best thing, except maybe grapes. Oh, and melons.
Eating and drinking was a distraction, a delay. A good place to break off, forget the story?
But the little flames in the samovar were glowing crimson and its brass body was still singing its troubled tune.
No, there was no stopping now. Sometimes speaking aloud, sometimes running it over in his mind …
“… a child …” (Was that out loud?)
“Ah, so after all that …”
“No, it was another man’s child.” Fyodor Dmitrich wondered anxiously how to explain. He didn’t altogether understand it himself.
“You may find it surprising … but that was by no means the end of it. On the contrary, it was just the beginning …”
He couldn’t see the look on the colonel’s face. Was it the same tense, impatient expression he had worn when he came into the compartment? Or had he composed himself to listen?
It had been dragging on for six years, but when had the unretractable step been taken? And was it really impossible to extricate himself even now?
Head thrown back, just like that time on the embankment—only now a head that had sunk beneath the waves and resurfaced, a head armed now with knowledge, with common sense, and even with power—no longer childishly full-cheeked but with lines of suffering etched in her face, her whole being concentrated in the unspoken question: can I come to you today?
“We wrote to each other all through 1915, without ever meeting. And she let slip fewer and fewer words of sympathy and affection, more often than not she was poking fun at me. Then, suddenly, like a cry for help: ‘If you too are sick at heart, share your feelings with me, if you’re at ease spare me … Because my heart is full of trouble!’ Then, in the next letter, she seemed to have forgotten all that, just talked about a book she’d read or a play she’d seen. But you know how it is, we don’t read women’s letters five times over, looking for coded messages between the lines. They turn our letters upside down, hold them up to the light … And what do we do? Pick out the tasty bits, squeeze the juice out of them—and pop the letter into a chest. We’re differently constructed: things that are of the utmost importance to them we don’t even notice. Where we see a tumbler running over they see a whole deluge. Run a skillful finger along her spine and it affects her more than … the dissolution of the Duma. Her character was a mess before, but now it’s completely ruined. Anyway, with the war on, everybody is more independent.”
It was the old story: a jilted girl isn’t going to stay on her own forever. It was just as you’d expect. She starts hanging around with a crowd from the Tambov powder factory. One of them is an engineer of some sort, “a pure Chekhov type,” a shrinking violet, melancholy, a dreamer, in fact a complete washout. His wife (Zinaida speaking) is, of course, “extremely colorless,” “a lifeless person.” Zinaida begins by bawling him out for hinting at a flirtation. But after blowing hot and cold for a bit she gives in—and immediately sends the engineer off to tell his wife everything! Oh, yes—she wanted the other woman to know!
“Just like that? He had to tell his wife about it himself?” the colonel asked with some animation.
“Yes. He was to go to her himself and tell her.”
“But why?”
Fyodor Dmitrievich didn’t really understand it himself. “I suppose she thought, ‘I can’t be happy with a dishonest relationship!’ The devil only knows how a girl’s mind works. I’m telling you, you’ll drive yourself crazy if you ever try to keep track of it.”
“So what did the engineer do?”
“Went to his wife. And came clean.”
The colonel tutted and hemmed. “And …?”
“And they went on like that for a few months.”
“Don’t you think it makes a kind of sense? Being honest and open? Why does it always have to be the other way?”
A black world was speeding past their black windows, relieved only by the pale shuddering reflection of neighboring windows, and the occasional faint twinkle of village lights.
“Or … can you imagine taking a flying leap? All shackles cast off for one moment of flight! Up again? Or down? Either way, who could help being envious? What wouldn’t we give for such an experience!”
Seen through the dark window the distant girl seemed to hover outside their compartment, speeding through dark space, borne along with the train. On feet? Wings? A broomstick?
“Or maybe it’s like one squeezed lemon calling out to another. What a merry dance we had! But the juice squeezed out was as sour and as cloudy and as boring as lemon juice always is. So was it worth it, Fyodor Dmitrich?”
Was it Fyodor Dmitrich who drove you into his arms? I’m sorry for you all right, but Fyodor Dmitrich can’t be bothered with you anymore. Just now Fyodor Dmitrich’s one wish is to solve a riddle: why the lemons? Their affair had come to end. The wife might be colorless, she might be limp—but she reclaimed her husband. And the naughty little girl took a tumble—from a carousel in full career. And, picking herself up wiser and stronger, to whom did she turn? Toward … the platform on Tambov station.
Fyodor Dmitrich had forgotten to drink his tea. Bent over his glass, transfixed, he was thinking. As though here, with just the two of them, thinking might get him somewhere.
The charcoal in the samovar had stopped glowing and turned to ash.
It was like sitting by an extinguished campfire.
“Then, suddenly, it was: Fyodor Dmitrich, my mother has died! And I couldn’t even show myself at her funeral …” Why on earth not? Your mother! What could possibly stop you? … “And her letters were not coming from Tambov anymore, but from somewhere near Kirsanov. Why? I wondered. Another riddle. It took a few more letters for me to work it out. She hadn’t been at her mother’s deathbed because she was concealing her pregnancy. She had borne the child in hiding, down in the country.”
All alone there, carrying her child, giving birth, feeding it, helpless, like a wounded bird … and there was only one person she could still speak to without shame—Fyodor was the one from whom she hid nothing, the one with whom she did not feel ashamed. Living in a hovel with a sagging ceiling, scarcely able to keep the stove going, cooking her own meals for the first time, and incompetently, she no longer tried to show off her well-turned phrases and clever thoughts, she no longer affected frivolous nonchalance, she gave up her crazy flights of fancy. Her milk had dried up! It sounds so beautiful—love without thought of marriage, selfless affection—but here was an exhausted mother with a feeble little mite and no milk for him. One wet nurse followed another. The future of Russia was immeasurably more important, she would agree, but when dear, soft little lips seek the source of life and you disappoint them, have nothing to give … The old high-and-mightiness, the insolent tone, the mockery were no more—she wrote asking in so many words for comfort: Fyodor Dmitrich, I have no past and no future, I have lived a senseless life, and my strength is exhausted … And I don’t believe in God the Comforter.
And yet—she is unrepentant. Regrets nothing. Doesn’t let the tittle-tattle in her distant hometown prey on her mind. Doesn
’t suffer from injured pride. It’s just the numbing fear of loneliness.
Flesh cannot enter through the double window from the eddying darkness outside. But she flies in pursuit, after the train, at their own speed, never falling behind. And perhaps penetrates their compartment with a chilling draft.
Suddenly he had found himself writing back with a warmth he had never shown before, an affectionate candor new to their relationship. She had a child by another man, but he felt no jealousy. Zinaida’s letters changed as the weeks went by—they grew more frequent and crossed his in the mail, so that they were no longer just answers to his own. She wrote freely and happily about her “little rascal,” how she worried about him, how he made her laugh, how everybody used to despair of her and say such a featherheaded girl would never make a mother, and here she was seeing to diapers and pacifiers with a song on her lips. And when the toothless little mouth laughed, the uprush of happiness was quite painful.
Why (she wondered) did she feel such tenderness for Fyodor Dmitrich? Well, “in spite of your ‘instinctual impulses’ (remember?) I’ve always known that through your trivial amours you were really seeking a higher happiness.”
Then an unexpected outburst: “I want to go to the Moscow Arts Theater!”
And one rainy August night, with a blustering wind banging the bucket against the wellhead, pitch-darkness outside, a dim oil lamp on the table (“we’re economizing on kerosene”)—"I know it’s disgraceful, I know it’s wicked in wartime, but I want bright lights, noise, color, music! … I read an advertisement in the Tambov Gazette for a concert by a Polish woman pianist, I’d heard her before, and I felt like rushing off to Tambov that very moment! It’s twelve versts from Korovainovo here to the Inzhava branch line, and then you have to wait for a connection to Kirsanov … but I’m joking, of course, I’ll never leave my little one.”
“After that there was a foggy patch, she didn’t seem able to work out what she felt. But, without putting it into words, she was asking me to come.” Anyway, he’d already had the idea of visiting her down in the country, in spite of the Inzhava branch line and the twelve versts by horse and carriage from the station.
The colonel came to life: “Listen—why didn’t you just marry her? Before she met the engineer or anybody else?”
“Georgi Mikhalich! … Come on! How could I?”
Did he really not see why?
He carefully slid the tray with the samovar toward the window. Then the glasses. And the jam jar.
“If you’re a man in your forties? If you’re already set in your opinions? If independence is the first principle of your existence?”
To be deprived all at once of leisure and freedom to move? To be eternally tied to her by some obligation? To be no longer yourself?
Both elbows resting firmly on the table. His head between his hands. Speaking into the unreadable quarter-light.
“Anyway, who knows how the marriage would have turned out? Can anybody ever fathom a woman’s character before marriage? What if it went wrong? Besides, there were four of us—two brothers and two sisters—left orphaned. One sister was an invalid—she had what they call a wasting disease. The other one was never going to marry either. And it was up to me to give my younger brother a start in life. It was for their sake I spent fourteen years giving the same old lessons, listening to the same old answers, till it nearly choked me, but what way out was there? They were orphans, and I was responsible for them. The holding and the house were joint property, from our father. If I married anybody it would have to be a Cossack girl, what else? But how could I, as I now was, marry an uneducated Cossack girl now? I adopted young Petya, he goes to secondary school now, he’ll make a splendid Cossack. When he gets a bit bigger, I’ll have to rustle up a full set of Cossack gear for him—a warhorse, a pack, thirteen different items of equipment, not counting ammunition.
“ ‘I mean it! Please, please! Come and see me! Here, at the back of beyond, in this out-of-the-way corner of the Kirsanov district, which no writer has ever visited and no one will ever write about, a spot with nothing at all to boast about, but come all the same! Our river, the Mokraya Panda, runs through a ravine out in the steppe—a remarkable spot, you’ll see. Do, do come, Fyodor Dmitrich, come right now, this September! I’m longing to see you!’ ”
As it happened, Fyodor could go. It fitted in with his plans. He promised.
By return mail came an agitated letter. “We’ve exchanged so many letters, but seen so little of each other! I’m so frightened!” He didn’t go after all. He was detained in his village. It was autumn, there was work to be done in the orchard, and he stayed to help his sisters. Not that this necessarily prevented him altogether, he could have made an effort and found time. But … the same old foggy patch, the same old blind corner … There was always some hitch, some reason for second thoughts … He didn’t go.
“I was looking forward so much to seeing you! I thought your coming would mean a whole new world for me! There was one evening of moonlight, such bright moonlight, with the river sparkling and the forest rustling, the village was asleep on the slopes down to the ravine, and there was I, so young, so friendless, with a new little life on my hands, yet so carefree, wandering around outside, telling myself, ‘This could be the day he comes,’ and hopping to make my guess good! I would have taken you into the forest, along a moonlit cutting, chattering and laughing, we would have sat on the grass. Why, oh, why didn’t you come? … Anyway, you didn’t, and the mood of the moment was over. I’ll write to you with pleasure, but I’m no longer so eager to see you. Anyway, nothing good could come of our meeting.”
Ah, but by now some force superior to his will or hers had intervened. Something was propelling them toward each other, and nothing could prevent it. Their meeting had been put off, but hasty telegrams followed: He could make it after all, not to the village, though, but to Tambov. She could come into town!
“But what about my son? I can’t leave him! It would upset me to leave him! I’ve never left him for a moment! … All right! I’ll be there! I’ll come!”
She had warmed up so much, become so passionate, so ardent bearing a child—never mind that it was not yours—so unlike her former self, live or in photographs, that he scarcely recognized her! How stupid he would have been not to go!
But the engineer? She hadn’t been unfaithful, that was the extraordinary thing. It was her way, however roundabout, to Fyodor.
So all their reservations, all the years of deliberate delay, were of no avail: they were thrown together just the same. And it was a fearful joy to hear her say, raising her head from the pillow, with a toss of her hair and her earrings, “No, you still don’t love me nearly enough! You’re going to love me a lot more!”
It could stifle a man! Fedya’s one great success in life so far had been not getting tied down, not letting anybody hobble him. And here he was, carried away, rolling helplessly downhill, with nothing to clutch at, nothing to check his fall.
“Why did you never come straight out with it and order me to follow you? That’s what caused it all.”
The snag was that, with Tambov now so far away, she was still beside him, still there, indeed more powerfully present than ever! It was as though she had splashed over him some dark, hot liquid, drenched him in it, and the hurt was still burning relentlessly. Usually, when you turn your back on a woman you yawn and forget her, but this time … Which made it all the more dangerous to succumb. How had it happened? How could he, with his experience, his common sense, and at his age, have risked himself so recklessly? With her it was a very serious matter, she wanted to take possession of him body and soul, wanted every last bit of him.
No, I must think of something. And write to her. That could be my salvation. Tomorrow from Petersburg.
“It’s such a hackneyed word,” she explained, snuggling up to him. “Everybody uses it, for no good reason. But it does happen, love does happen, Fedenka, not very often, but …”
Something like
this: yes, I fell for you, but the fact is … although I never told you … there’s somebody else. That “somebody else” would erect a barrier between them. The only possible defense against a woman is another woman.
Defend myself—yes. But the thought of giving her up tears my breast with hot hooks. Presented with a girl like that when I’m pushing fifty—how can I give her up?
Fedya had been thinking aloud less and less, and by now his lips were moving soundlessly. Whether his companion was still listening, or dozing, he made no response. He might perhaps have given Fedya some helpful advice, but he did not react.
A man tumbling downhill has no time to think—bouncing helplessly, rebounding, bumping his head, now back, now front, he flings out his arms, clutching wildly, and if they meet a stone, a root, a blade of grass—grab it! You can’t make out what it is, but grab it! Farther on there will be nothing, no fences no gentle slope, nothing will save you!
Vorotyntsev had in fact heard more of this story than he could have wished, more than he would ordinarily listen to. He had unwittingly let himself be diverted from his own anxious preoccupations, listened—and marveled.
Not at Fedya—he was just another example of a very common type, the man who gets in a muddle over such a simple matter as marriage. But what Vorotyntsev felt, listening to him, was not condescending pity, it was something like dread.
He was astonished by that woman. Hopping on one foot. God forbid that he should ever tangle with such a twisted creature, but did such things really happen? Did such a woman exist? A woman with a child by someone else—yet able to exercise such attraction? This consuming passion under a humdrum exterior—that was what amazed him.
And awakened his envy.
And a vague feeling that he had missed something.
*
* *
About my shoulders you have draped the cloak of sadness, In my belly put the cold stone of barrenness.
November 1916 Page 31