‘Jean, my pet,’ Vera Iosifovna told her husband. ‘Dites que l’on nous donne du thé.’
Startsev was introduced to Yekaterina Ivanovna, an eighteen-year-old girl who was the image of her mother – and just as thin and attractive. Her waist was slim and delicate, and her expression was still that of a child. And her youthful, already well-developed, beautiful, healthy bosom hinted at spring, true spring. Then they had tea with jam, honey, chocolates, and very tasty pastries that simply melted in one’s mouth.
Towards evening more guests began to arrive and Ivan Petrovich would look at them with his laughing eyes and say: ‘Good evening – if you please!’
Then they all sat in the drawing-room with very serious expressions, and Vera Iosifovna read from her novel, which began: ‘The frost was getting harder…’ The windows were wide open and they could hear the clatter of knives in the kitchen; the smell of fried onion drifted over from the yard… To be sitting in those soft armchairs was highly relaxing and the lamps winked so very invitingly in the twilight of the drawing-room; and now, on an early summer’s evening, when the sound of voices and laughter came from the street and the scent of lilac wafted in from outside, it was difficult to understand all that claptrap about how the frost was getting harder and ‘the setting sun was illuminating with its cold rays the lonely wayfarer crossing a snowy plain’. Vera Iosifovna read how a beautiful young countess established schools, hospitals and libraries in her village and how she fell in love with a wandering artist. She read of things that never happen in real life. All the same, it was pleasantly soothing to hear about them – and they evoked such serene and delightful thoughts that one was reluctant to get up.
‘Not awfully baddish!’ Ivan Petrovich said softly.
One of the guests, whose thoughts were wandering far, far away as he listened, remarked: ‘Yes… indeed…’
One hour passed, then another. In the municipal park close by a band was playing and a choir was singing. For five minutes after Vera Iosifovna had closed her manuscript everyone sat in silence listening to the choir singing ‘By Rushlight’, a song that conveyed what really happens in life and what was absent from the novel.
‘Do you have your works published in magazines?’ Startsev asked Vera Iosifovna.
‘No,’ she replied. ‘I don’t publish them anywhere… I hide away what I’ve written in a cupboard. And why publish?’ she explained. ‘It’s not as if we need the money.’
And for some reason everyone sighed.
‘And now, Pussycat, play us something,’ Ivan Petrovich told his daughter.
They raised the piano lid and opened some music that happened to be lying there ready. Yekaterina Ivanovna sat down and struck the keys with both hands. And then she immediately struck them again, with all her might – and again and again. Her shoulders and bosom quivered, relentlessly she kept hammering away in the same place and it seemed that she had no intention of stopping until she had driven those keys deep into the piano. The drawing-room was filled with the sound of thunder. Everything reverberated – floor, ceiling, furniture. Yekaterina Ivanovna played a long, difficult, monotonous passage that was interesting solely on account of its difficulty. As Startsev listened he visualized large boulders rolling from the top of a high mountain, rolling and forever rolling – and he wanted the rolling to quickly stop. And at the same time, Yekaterina Ivanovna, her face pink from the exertion, strong and brimful of energy, with a lock of hair tumbling onto her forehead, struck him as most attractive. And how pleasant and refreshing it was, after a winter spent in Dyalizh among patients and peasants, to be sitting in that drawing-room, to be looking at that young, exquisite and most probably innocent creature, to be listening to those deafening, tiresome, yet civilized sounds.
‘Well, Pussycat! You’ve really excelled yourself today!’ Ivan Petrovich said with tears in his eyes, rising to his feet when his daughter had finished. ‘“Die now Denis, you’ll never write better!”’2
They all surrounded and congratulated her, expressed their admiration and assured her that it was a long, long time since they had heard such a performance, while she listened in silence, faintly smiling – and triumph was written all over her figure.
‘Wonderful! Excellent!’ Startsev exclaimed too, yielding to the general mood of enthusiasm.
‘Where did you study music?’ he asked Yekaterina. ‘At the Conservatoire?’
‘No, I’m still only preparing for it, but in the meantime I’ve been having lessons with Madame Zavlovsky.’
‘Did you go to the local high school?’
‘Oh no!’ intervened Vera Iosifovna. ‘We engaged private tutors. At high school or boarding-school, you must agree, one could meet with bad influences. A growing girl should be under the influence of her mother and no one else.’
‘I’m going to the Conservatoire all the same,’ Yekaterina retorted.
‘No, Pussycat loves her Mama. Pussycat’s not going to upset Mama and Papa, is she?’
‘I will go, I will!’ replied Yekaterina half-joking, acting like a naughty child and stamping her little foot.
Over supper Ivan Petrovich was able to display his talents. He told funny stories, laughing only with his eyes; he joked, he set absurd riddles and solved them himself, perpetually talking in his own weird lingo that had been cultivated by lengthy practice in the fine art of wit and which had evidently become second nature to him by now:
‘A real whopper! – not awfully baddish! – thanking you most convulsively!’
But that was not all. When the guests, replete and contented, crowded in the hall, sorting out their coats and canes, Pavlushka the footman (or Peacock as he was nicknamed), a boy of about fourteen with cropped hair and chubby cheeks, kept bustling around them.
‘Now, Peacock, perform!’ Ivan Petrovich told him.
Peacock struck a pose and raised one arm aloft.
‘Die, wretched woman!’ he declaimed in tragic accents. And everyone roared with laughter.
‘Most entertaining!’ thought Startsev as he went out into the street. He called at a restaurant and drank some beer before setting off for Dyalizh. All the way he kept humming: ‘Thy voice for me is dear and languorous.’3
After a six-mile walk he went to bed, not feeling in the least tired: on the contrary, he felt that he could have walked another thirteen miles with the greatest pleasure.
‘Not awfully baddish!’ he remembered as he dozed off. And he burst out laughing.
II
Startsev had always been intending to visit the Turkins again, but he was so overloaded with work in the hospital that it was impossible to find a spare moment. This way more than a year passed in hard work and solitude. But one day someone from town brought him a letter in a light blue envelope.
Vera Iosifovna had long been suffering from migraine but recently, when Pussycat had been scaring her every day by threatening to go off to the Conservatoire, the attacks had become much more frequent. Every doctor in town called on the Turkins, until finally it was the district doctor’s turn. Vera Iosifovna wrote him a touching letter, begging him to come and relieve her sufferings. So Startsev went and subsequently became a very frequent visitor at the Turkins’ – very frequent. In point of fact, he did help Vera Iosifovna a little and she told all her friends that he was an exceptional, a truly wonderful doctor. But it was no longer the migraine that brought Startsev to the Turkins’.
He had the day off. Yekaterina Ivanovna finished her interminable, tiresome piano exercises, after which they all sat in the dining-room for a long time drinking tea, while Ivan Petrovich told one of his funny stories. But then the front door bell rang and Ivan Petrovich had to go into the hall to welcome some new visitor. Startsev took advantage of the momentary distraction and whispered to Yekaterina Ivanovna in great agitation:
‘Don’t torment me, for Christ’s sake. I beg you! Let’s go into the garden.’
She shrugged her shoulders as if at a loss to understand what he wanted from her; still, s
he got up and went out.
‘You usually play the piano for three or four hours at a time,’ he said as he followed her, ‘then you sit with your mama, so I have no chance to talk to you. Please spare me a mere quarter of an hour. I beg you!’
Autumn was approaching and all was quiet and sad in the old garden; dark leaves lay thick on the paths. Already the evenings were drawing in.
‘I haven’t seen you the whole week,’ Startsev continued. ‘If you only knew what hell I’ve been through! Let’s sit down. Please listen to what I have to say.’
Both of them had their favourite spot in the garden – the bench under the broad, old maple. And now they sat down on this bench.
‘What do you want?’ Yekaterina Ivanovna asked in a dry, matter-of-fact tone.
‘I haven’t seen you the whole week. It’s been so long since I heard you speak. I passionately want to hear your voice, I thirst for it! Please speak.’
She captivated him by her freshness, by that naïve expression of her eyes and cheeks. Even in the way she wore her dress he saw something exceptionally charming, touching in its simplicity and innocent grace. And at the same time, despite her naïveté, she struck him as extremely intelligent and mature for her age. With someone like her he could discuss literature, art – anything he liked in fact; he could complain to her about life, about people, although during serious conversations she would sometimes suddenly start laughing quite inappropriately and run back to the house. Like almost all the young ladies of S— she read a great deal (on the whole the people of S— read very little and they said in the local library that if it weren’t for girls and young Jews they might as well close the place down). This pleased Startsev immeasurably and every time they met he would excitedly ask her what she had been reading over the past few days and he would listen enchanted when she told him.
‘What did you read that week we didn’t meet?’ he asked her now. ‘Tell me, I beg you.’
‘I read Pisemsky.’4
‘And what precisely?’
‘A Thousand Souls,’ Pussycat replied. ‘And what a funny name Pisemsky had: Aleksey Feofilaktych!’
‘But where are you going?’ Startsev cried out in horror when she suddenly got up and went towards the house. ‘I must talk to you… there’s something I must explain… Please stay, for just five minutes! I implore you!’
She stopped as if she wanted to say something. Then she awkwardly thrust a little note into his hand and ran off into the house, where she sat down at the piano again.
‘Be at the cemetery tonight at eleven o’clock by the Demetti tomb,’ read Startsev.
‘Well, that’s really rather silly,’ he thought, collecting himself. ‘Why the cemetery? What for?’
Pussycat was obviously playing one of her little games. Who in their right mind would want to arrange a rendezvous at night in a cemetery, miles from town, when they could easily have met in the street or the municipal park? And did it become him, a district doctor, an intelligent, respectable person, to be sighing, receiving billets-doux, hanging around cemeteries, doing things so silly that even schoolboys would laugh at them these days! What would his colleagues say if they found out?
These were Startsev’s thoughts as he wandered around the tables at the club. But at half past ten he suddenly upped and went to the cemetery.
He now had his own carriage and pair – and a coachman called Panteleymon, who wore a velvet waistcoat. The moon was shining. It was quiet and warm but autumn was in the air. Near the abattoirs in one of the suburbs dogs were howling. Startsev left his carriage in a lane on the edge of town and walked the rest of the way to the cemetery. ‘Everyone has his peculiar side,’ he thought. ‘Pussycat’s rather weird too and – who knows? – perhaps she’s not joking and she’ll turn up.’ And he surrendered to this feeble, vain hope – and it intoxicated him.
For a quarter of a mile he walked over the fields. The cemetery5 appeared in the distance as a dark strip – like a forest or large garden. The white stone wall, the gates came into view… In the moonlight he could read on the gates: ‘The hour is coming when…’6 Startsev passed through a wicket-gate and what first caught his eye were the white crosses and tombstones on either side of a wide avenue and the black shadows cast by them and the poplars. All around, far and wide, he could see black and white, and the sleepy trees lowered their branches over the white beneath them. It seemed lighter here than in the open fields. The paw-like leaves of the maples stood out sharply against the yellow sand of the avenues and against the gravestones, while inscriptions on monuments were clearly visible. Immediately Startsev was struck by what he was seeing for the first time in his life and what he would probably never see again: a world that was unlike any other, a world where the moonlight was so exquisite and soft it seemed to have its cradle here; a world where there was no life – no, not one living thing – but where, in every dark poplar, in every grave, one sensed the presence of some secret that promised peaceful, beautiful, eternal life. From those stones and faded flowers, mingling with the smell of autumnal leaves, there breathed forgiveness, sadness and peace.
All around was silence. The stars looked down from the heavens in profound humility and Startsev’s footsteps rang out so sharply, so jarringly here. Only when the chapel clock began to strike and he imagined himself dead and buried here for ever did he have the feeling that someone was watching him and for a minute he thought that here was neither peace nor tranquillity, only the mute anguish of non-existence, of stifled despair…
Demetti’s tomb was in the form of a shrine surmounted by an angel. An Italian opera company had once passed through S— and one of the female singers had died. She had been buried here and they had erected this monument. No longer was she remembered in town, but the lamp over the entrance to the shrine reflected the moonlight and seemed to be burning.
No one was there. And how could anyone think of coming here at midnight? But Startsev waited – and as if the moonlight were kindling his desires he waited passionately, imagining kisses and embraces. He sat by the monument for about half an hour, then he wandered along side-paths, hat in hand, waiting and reflecting how many women and young girls who had once been beautiful and enchanting, who had loved and burnt at night with passion, who had yielded to caresses, lay buried here. And in effect, what a terrible joke Nature plays on man – and how galling to be conscious of it!
These were Startsev’s thoughts – and at the same time he wanted to shout out loud that he yearned for love, that he was waiting for love and that he must have it at all costs. Now he no longer saw slabs of white marble, but beautiful bodies; he saw figures coyly hiding in the shadows of the trees. He felt their warmth – and this yearning became all too much to bear…
And then, just as if a curtain had been lowered, the moon vanished behind the clouds and suddenly everything went dark. Startsev had difficulty finding the gate – all around it was dark, the darkness of an autumn night. Then he wandered around for an hour and a half, looking for the lane where he had left the carriage and pair.
‘I’m so exhausted I can barely stand,’ he told Panteleymon. And as he happily settled down in the carriage he thought: ‘Oh, I really ought to lose some weight!’
III
Next evening he went to the Turkins’ to propose to Yekaterina Ivanovna. But it happened to be an inconvenient time, since Yekaterina Ivanovna was in her room with her hairdresser having her hair done. That evening she was going to a dance at the club.
So once again he was condemned to a tea-drinking session in the dining-room. Noticing that his guest was bored and in a thoughtful mood Ivan Petrovich took some small pieces of paper from his waistcoat pocket and read out a comical letter from a German estate manager, that ‘all the machinations on the estate were ruinated’ and that ‘all the proprieties had collapsed’.
‘I bet they’ll come up with a good dowry,’ Startsev thought, listening absent-mindedly.
After a sleepless night he was in a state of stupo
r, just as if he had been given some sweetly cloying sleeping draught. His feelings were confused, but warm and joyful – and at the same time a cold, obdurate, small section of his brain kept reasoning: ‘Stop before it’s too late! Is she the right kind of wife for you? She’s spoilt, capricious, she sleeps until two in the afternoon. But you’re a sacristan’s son, a country doctor…’
‘Well, what of it?’ he thought. ‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘What’s more, if you marry her,’ continued the small voice, ‘her family will make you give up your country practice and you’ll have to move to town.’
‘What of it?’ he thought. ‘Nothing wrong with living in town. And there’ll be a dowry, we’ll set up house together…’
At last in came Yekaterina Ivanovna, wearing a ball gown, décolletée, looking very pretty and elegant. Startsev couldn’t admire her enough and such was his delight that he was at a loss for words and could only look on and smile.
She began to make her farewells and he stood up – there was nothing more for him to stay for – saying that it was time he went home as his patients were waiting.
‘Well, it can’t be helped, you’d better go,’ said Ivan Petrovich. ‘At the same time you could give Pussycat a lift to the club.’
Outside it was drizzling and very dark, and only from Panteleymon’s hoarse cough could they tell where the carriage was. They put the hood up.
‘Such a fright will set you alight,’ Ivan Petrovich said, seating his daughter in the carriage. ‘If you lie – it’s as nice as pie…! Off you go now. Goodbye – if you please!’
They drove off.
‘Last night I went to the cemetery,’ Startsev began. ‘How unkind, how heartless of you!’
‘You went to the cemetery?’
‘Yes, I went and waited for you until two o’clock. It was sheer hell.’
Delighted to have played such a cunning trick on the man who loved her, and that she was the object of such fervent passion, Yekaterina Ivanovna burst out laughing – and then she suddenly screamed with terror, for just then the horses turned sharply through the club gates, making the carriage lurch violently. Startsev put his arms around Yekaterina Ivanovna’s waist as she clung to him in her fright.