He went over to her and put his hands on her shoulders, intending to caress her, to joke a little – and then he caught sight of himself in the mirror.
He was already going grey. And he thought it strange that he had aged so much over the past years, had lost his good looks. The shoulders on which his hands were resting were warm and trembling. He felt pity for this life, still so warm and beautiful, but probably about to fade and wither like his own. Why did she love him so? Women had never taken him for what he really was – they didn’t love the man himself, but someone who was a figment of their imagination, someone they had been eagerly seeking all their lives. And then, when they realized their mistake, they still loved him. Not one of them had been happy with him. Time passed, he met new women, had affairs, parted, but never once had he been in love. There had been everything else, but there had been no love.
And only now, when his hair had turned grey, had he genuinely, truly fallen in love – for the first time in his life.
Anna Sergeyevna and he loved one another as close intimates, as man and wife, as very dear friends. They thought that fate itself had intended them for each other and it was a mystery why he should have a wife and she a husband. And in fact they were like two birds of passage, male and female, caught and forced to live in separate cages. They forgave one another all they had been ashamed of in the past, forgave everything in the present, and they felt that this love of theirs had transformed them both.
Before, in moments of sadness, he had reassured himself with any kind of argument that happened to enter his head, but now he was not in the mood for arguments: he felt profound pity and wanted to be sincere, tender…
‘Please stop crying, my sweet,’ he said. ‘You’ve had a good cry… it’s enough… Let’s talk now – we’ll think of something.’
Then they conferred for a long time and wondered how they could free themselves from the need to hide, to deceive, to live in different towns, to see each other only after long intervals. How could they break free from these intolerable chains?
‘How? How?’ he asked, clutching his head. ‘How?’
And it seemed – given a little more time – a solution would be found and then a new and beautiful life would begin. And both of them clearly realized that the end was far, far away and that the most complicated and difficult part was only just beginning.
In the Ravine
I
The village of Ukleyevo lay in a ravine, so that only the church belfry and the chimneys of calico-printing works could be seen from the main road and the railway station. When travellers asked its name they were told, ‘It’s that place where the lay reader ate all the caviare at a funeral.’
Once, during a wake at Kostyukov the manufacturer’s house, an elderly lay reader had spotted some unpressed caviare among the savouries and immediately started gobbling it up. People nudged him, tugged his sleeve, but he seemed to be paralysed from the sheer enjoyment of it, which made him oblivious of everything, and he just continued eating, regardless. He scoffed the whole lot – and it was a four-pound jar! All this had happened many years ago and the lay reader was long since dead, but the story of the caviare was still fresh in everyone’s mind. Whether it was because life there was so wretched or simply that the people could find nothing more exciting to talk about than that trivial little incident of ten years before, it was all you ever heard about Ukleyevo.
Swamp fever was still rife here and even in summer there were slimy patches of mud – especially under fences – which lay in the broad shade of old, overhanging willows. There was always a smell of factory waste, of the acetic acid they used for processing the cotton. The factories – three cotton-printing works and one tannery – were not in the village itself but a short distance away, on the outskirts. They weren’t very large and the total workforce didn’t amount to much more than four hundred. The waste from the tannery made the water in the small river stink horribly, the meadows were polluted by the effluent, the cattle in the village suffered from anthrax, and so it was ordered to close down. However, although it was supposed to be shut, it was kept going on the quiet, with the full approval of the district police inspector and doctor, each receiving ten roubles a month from the owner. There were only two houses worthy of the name in the whole village, built of stone and with iron roofs. One of them was occupied by the council offices, while Grigory Petrov Tsybukin, a shopkeeper from Yepifan,1 lived in the other, which was two storeys high and stood right opposite the church.
Grigory kept a grocery store, but this was only a cover for his secret business in vodka, cattle, hides, grain, pigs – in fact he sold anything that came his way. For example, when there were export orders for peasant women’s bonnets (these were made into fashionable hats for ladies), he could earn himself thirty copecks a pair. He bought trees for sawing up, lent money on interest, and really the old man could turn his hand to anything. He had two sons. Anisim, the elder, was a police detective and seldom came home. The younger son, Stepan, had gone into the business to help his father. However, they could not expect any real help from him as he was in poor health and deaf as well. His wife, Aksinya, was a beautiful, well-built woman, who wore a hat and carried a parasol when she went to village festivals. She was an early riser, went late to bed and all day long kept rushing round the barn, the cellar or the shop with her skirts tucked up and her bunch of keys jangling. Old Tsybukin would cheer up as he watched her and his eyes would sparkle. At such moments he regretted that she had not married his elder son, but the younger one instead, who besides being deaf couldn’t tell the beautiful from the ugly.
The old man always had a strong liking for domestic life and he loved his family more than anything else in the world – especially his elder detective son and his daughter-in-law. No sooner had Aksinya married the deaf son than she began to display an extraordinary head for business; in no time she got to know those who were credit-worthy and those she had to turn down. She always took charge of the keys, not even trusting her own husband with them, and she would click away at her abacus. Like a true peasant, she would look at a horse’s teeth first and was always laughing or shouting. Whatever she did or said, it warmed the old man’s heart and he would mutter, ‘Well done, my daughter-in-law! That’s the way, my beautiful girl!’
He had been a widower, but a year after his son’s marriage he could bear it no longer and remarried. About twenty miles from Ukleyevo they found him a spinster called Varvara Nikolayevna, from a good family. Although she was middle-aged, she still kept her good looks. From the moment she settled into her little room on the first floor, everything in the house became shining bright, as though all the windows had suddenly been fitted with new glass. Icon-lamps were lit, tables covered with snow-white cloths, flowers with little red buds appeared on the window sills and in the front garden, and at mealtimes everyone had his own individual dish instead of eating from a communal bowl. Varvara Nikolayevna’s warm, fetching smile seemed to infect the whole household. And then something quite out of the ordinary happened – beggars, wanderers and female pilgrims began to call at the house. The plaintive singsong voices of the Ukleyevo women and the guilty coughing of weak, haggard-looking peasants, sacked from the factory for drunkenness, came from outside, beneath the window-ledges. Varvara gave them money, bread, old clothes and, later on, when she was really settled in, brought them things from the shop. On one occasion the deaf son was most upset when he saw her taking away two small packets of tea.
‘Mother’s just pinched two packets of tea,’ he told his father. ‘Who’s supposed to be paying for them?’
The old man did not reply, but stood there pondering and twitching his eyebrows; then he went upstairs to his wife. ‘Varvara, dear,’ he said affectionately, ‘if ever you need anything from the shop, then help yourself. Take as much as you like, and don’t feel guilty.’
Next day the deaf son shouted out to her as he ran across the yard, ‘Mother, if you need anything, just help yourself!’
r /> There was something fresh, cheerful and gay in her displays of charity, just like those brightly burning icon-lamps and the little red flowers. On the eve of a fast or on a saint’s day festival (they usually took three days to celebrate them) when they used to fob the peasants off with rotten salt beef, which gave off such a revolting stench you could hardly go near the barrel; when they let the drunks pawn their scythes, caps, their wives’ scarves; when the factory-hands, their heads reeling from cheap vodka, wallowed in the mud, so that the shamelessness of it all seemed to hang overhead in a thick haze – at these times it came as a relief to think that over there in the house lived a quiet, tidy woman who would have nothing to do with either salt beef or vodka. On such distressing, murky days her acts of charity had the effect of a safety-valve.
Every day at the Tsybukins’ was a busy one. Before the sun had even risen, Aksinya puffed and panted as she washed herself in the hall, while the samovar boiled away in the kitchen with an ominous hum. Old Grigory Petrov, who looked so neat and small in his long black frock-coat, cotton-print trousers and shining jackboots, would pace up and down the house, tapping his heels like the father-in-law in the popular song. Then they would open the shop. When it was light, the racing droshky would be brought round to the front door and the old man would pull his large peaked cap right over his ears and jump into it with all the friskiness of a young man. To look at him no one would have guessed that he was already fifty-six. His wife and daughter-in-law used to see him off and on these momentous occasions, when he wore his fine clean frock-coat, when the enormous black stallion that had cost three hundred roubles was hitched to the droshky, the old man didn’t like it if peasants came up to him asking for favours or complaining. He hated them and they disgusted him. If he happened to see one hanging around the gates he would shout furiously, ‘What yer standing round here for? Clear off!’ If it was a beggar he would yell, ‘God’ll feed yer!’
While he was away on business his wife, with her dark dress and black apron, would tidy the rooms or help in the kitchen. Aksinya served in the shop and one could hear bottles and coins clinking, the sound of her laughter or of offended customers getting cross. At the same time it was all too plain that the illegal vodka business was already running nice and smoothly. Her deaf husband would sit in the shop with her or walk up and down the street without any hat, hands in pockets, vacantly gazing at the huts or up at the sky. They drank tea six times a day in that house and had four proper meals at the table. In the evening they counted the takings, entered them in the books and then slept soundly.
All three cotton-printing works in Ukleyevo, as well as the owners’ homes – the Khrymins’ Senior, Khrymins’ Junior and the Kostyukovs’ – were on the telephone. The council offices had also been connected, but before long the telephone there was jammed with bugs and cockroaches. The chairman of the district council could barely read or write and began every word in his report with a capital letter; but when the telephone went out of order he remarked, ‘Yes, it’s going to be tricky without that telephone.’
The Khrymins Senior were perpetually suing the Khrymins Junior, and the Khrymins Junior sometimes quarrelled among themselves and sued each other – then their factory would stand idle for a month or two until they had patched things up: all this provided a source of amusement for the people of Ukleyevo, since each row provoked no end of gossip and malicious talk.
Kostyukov and the Khrymins Junior would go out driving on Sundays, running over calves as they tore through Ukleyevo. With her starched petticoats rustling and dressed to kill, Aksinya would stroll up and down the street near the shop; then the Khrymins Junior would swoop down and carry her off with them as though they were kidnapping her. Old Tsybukin would drive out to show off his new horse, taking his Varvara with him.
In the evening, when the riding was over and everyone was going to bed, someone would play an expensive-sounding accordion in the Khrymins’ Junior yard; if the moon was shining, the music stirred and gladdened one’s heart and Ukleyevo did not seem such a miserable hole after all.
II
Anisim (the elder son) came home very rarely – only for the principal festivals – but he often sent presents, which he handed to friends from the same village to take back for him, as well as letters written by someone else in a beautiful hand and invariably on good-quality paper, so that they looked like official application forms. They were filled with expressions that Anisim would never have used in conversation, for example: ‘My dear Mama and Papa, I’m sending you a pound of herb tea for the gratification of your physical requirements.’ At the foot of each letter the name Anisim Tsybukin was scribbled – with a cross-nibbed pen, it seemed – and beneath his signature, in the same beautiful handwriting, would appear the word ‘Agent’. These letters were read out loud, several times, and afterwards the old man, deeply moved by them and flushed with excitement, would say, ‘There you are, he wouldn’t stay at home, wanted to be a scholar instead. Well, if that’s what he wants! Each to his own, I say.’
Once, just before Shrovetide, there were torrential rainfalls and sleet. The old man and Varvara went to look out of the window, and lo and behold! – there was Anisim coming from the station on a sledge. This was a complete surprise. When he entered the room, he looked anxious, as though terribly worried by something; he stayed like this for the rest of his visit and he behaved in a rather free-and-easy, offhand way. He was in no hurry to leave, and it looked as though they had given him the sack. Varvara was glad he had come, eyed him cunningly, sighed and shook her head: ‘Don’t know what to make of it,’ she said. ‘The lad’s turned twenty-seven and he’s still running around like a gay bachelor! Oh, dear, dear me!’ They could hear her quiet, regular speech – a series of ‘dear, dear me’s’ from the next room. Then she began whispering to the old man and Aksinya, and their faces took on that same cunning, mysterious, conspiratorial expression.
They had decided to marry Anisim off.
‘Oh, dear, dear me! Your young brother was married ages ago,’ Varvara said, ‘but you’re still without a mate, just like a cock in the market. What kind of life is that? If you did get married, God willing, you could do as you please, go back to work, while your wife could stay at home and be a help to you. It’s a wild life you’re leading, my boy, I can see you’ve really gone off the rails. Oh, dear, dear me, you lot from the town bring nothing but trouble!’
When a Tsybukin married, he could take the prettiest girl, as they were all very wealthy, and they found a pretty one for Anisim too. As for him, he was insignificant and uninteresting: while he was short and had a poorly built, unhealthy looking body, his cheeks were full and plump – as though he were puffing them out. He never blinked and his eyes had a piercing look. His beard was reddish and straggly, and he was always sticking it in his mouth and biting it when he was deep in thought. Moreover, he was very fond of the bottle – one could tell from his face and the way he walked. But when they told him that a very pretty bride had been found for him, he remarked, ‘Well, I’m not exactly a freak. All of us Tsybukins are good-looking, that’s for sure.’
The village of Torguyevo lay right next to the town. One half had recently been merged with it, while the other stayed as it was. In the town half there lived a widow, in her own little house. She had a very poor sister, who had to go out to work every day; this sister had a daughter called Lipa, who went out to work as well. Her beauty had long been a talking-point in Torguyevo, but her terrible poverty put everyone off. So they reasoned that perhaps some old man or widower might turn a blind eye to this and would marry her or would ‘set her up’ in his house – and if that happened the mother would not have to starve. When the local matchmakers told her about Lipa, Varvara drove out to Torguyevo.
After that, an ‘inspection’2 was arranged (as was proper) at the aunt’s house, with snacks and drinks. Lipa wore a new pink dress made especially for the viewing and a crimson ribbon shone like a flame in her hair. She was a thin, pale-faced,
fragile girl with fine, delicate features and her skin was tanned from working in the open air. Her face bore a perpetual sad, timid smile and her eyes were like a child’s – trusting and inquisitive at the same time.
She was young – still a little girl in fact – with scarcely noticeable breasts. However, she was old enough for marriage. In actual fact she was a beauty, and the only objectionable thing about her was her large arms, just like a man’s, which she allowed to dangle idly, so that they resembled two huge crab’s claws.
‘We’re not in the least worried that there’s no dowry,’ the old man told the aunt. ‘We took a girl in from a poor family for our son Stepan, and now we can’t praise her enough. She’s a wonderful help in the house and the business.’
Lipa stood by the door and it seemed she wanted to say, ‘You can do what you like with me, I trust you,’ while her mother, Praskovya, who had to go out charring, was overcome with shyness and shut herself away in the kitchen. Once, when she was still a young girl, a certain merchant (whose floors she used to scrub) suddenly stamped his feet at her in a fit of anger. She was terrified, went numb all over and the shock of it never left her for the rest of her life: her arms and legs were always trembling with fright – and her cheeks as well. From where she sat in the kitchen, she always tried hard to hear what visitors were saying in the next room, kept crossing herself, pressed her fingers to her forehead and peered at the icon. A slightly tipsy Anisim would open the kitchen door and breezily inquire, ‘What you sitting out here for, my dearest Mama? It’s so dull without you.’ This would make Praskovya turn shy and she would clasp her small, wasted breasts and reply, ‘But sir, you really shouldn’t! I’m only too pleased… sir!’
After the inspection, the wedding day was fixed. Later on, when he was home, Anisim kept pacing up and down whistling; or something would suddenly spring to mind which made him think hard, look at the floor without moving an inch and stare so hard that it seemed he was trying to bore a hole deep into the earth with his eyes. He didn’t show any pleasure at the fact that he was getting married, that it was going to be soon – the week after Easter – nor did he show any inclination to see his bride – all he did was whistle. Obviously he was marrying only because his father and stepmother wanted him to and because that was how things were done in the village: sons got married to have someone to help them in the house. He didn’t hurry himself when the time came to leave and his behaviour during this last visit was quite different from the previous one – he was particularly free-and-easy with everyone and kept speaking out of turn.