“Cela passe toute permission!”* thought Antigone. She was furious.
“I’m sorry!” said Oedipus to Alexander. “Perhaps we’re in your way?”
“No,” said Alexander. “It’s just that I’m tired.”
“Any bites?” the old man asked Kostyakov.
“How can you expect to get a bite, when people are standing and talking right at your elbow?!” he replied truculently. “Some blighter walked right past me, blurted out something and brought me bad luck – and of course, hardly a bite since then. So I assume you must live somewhere around here?” he asked Oedipus.
“That’s our dacha, just over there, with the balcony,” he replied.
“Is it expensive, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“Five hundred roubles for the summer.”
“It looks like a good one, well appointed, and lots of buildings in the courtyard. It probably cost the owner 30,000.”
“Yes, about that.”
“Right; and this is your daughter?”
“She is.”
“Lovely young lady! You’re out for a walk?”
“Yes, we are; if you’re living in a dacha, you go walking.”
“Of course, naturally, you have to; the weather is good right now, not like it was last week – awful weather! God spare us! I expect it ruined the winter crop.”
“It will recover, God willing.”
“Let’s hope so!”
“So you’re not catching anything right now?”
“Not me; but take a look at what he’s caught!” he pointed to the perch. “I have to tell you,” he went on, “you won’t believe his luck! It’s too bad his mind isn’t on it, otherwise we would never leave empty-handed. Imagine letting a pike like that get away!”
He sighed.
Antigone began to prick up her ears, but Kostyakov fell silent.
The old man and his daughter began to appear more and more regularly, and Aduyev favoured them with his attention. From time to time he even exchanged a word or two with the old man, but never a word with his daughter. At first she found it annoying, then she resented it, and finally it began to upset her. Now, if Aduyev had paid her some normal, polite attention, she would have forgotten about him – but, as it was, it had the opposite effect. It would seem that the human heart is nothing if not perverse; if it weren’t for this, there would be no need for us to have hearts at all.
Antigone at first started contemplating some terrible plan of revenge, but as time went by she gradually abandoned it.
Once, when the old man and his daughter came by, Alexander after a while stood his rod up against a bush and went to sit in his usual place, listlessly regarding the father and daughter in turn. They were standing sideways on to him. He didn’t notice anything special about the father – a white smock, nankeen trousers and a hat with a low crown and a wide brim lined with green plush. But when it came to the daughter on the other hand – how gracefully she leant on her father’s arm! From time to time, the wind lifted her hair from her face, as if deliberately trying to display to Alexander the beauty of her profile and her white neck, slightly raised her silken mantilla to reveal her slender waist, or swirled around the hem of her dress to show off her little feet. She was simply gazing at the water.
For a long time Alexander couldn’t take his eyes off her, and felt a feverish shiver running through his body. He turned away from the source of the temptation and began to slash the heads off flowers with a switch.
“Oh, I understand what’s happening!” he thought. “If I gave way to my feelings, love would be there for the taking. That would be stupid! Uncle is right. But I won’t be driven by sheer animal feeling alone: no, I haven’t sunk that low.”
“Could I try my hand at fishing?” the girl asked Kostyakov timidly.
“Yes, young lady, why not?” Kostyakov replied, handing her Aduyev’s rod.
“Now there’s a partner for you!” said her father to Kostyakov, leaving his daughter and starting to stroll along the bank of the river. As he left, he added, “Liza, don’t forget to catch some fish for supper!”
For several minutes, there was silence.
“Why is your friend so down in the mouth?” Liza asked Kostyakov quietly.
“He’s been passed over for promotion three times.”
“What?” she asked, wrinkling her brow.
“It’s the third time, apparently, that he didn’t get his promotion.”
She shook her head.
“No, can’t be!” she thought. “That’s not it!”
“Don’t you believe me, young lady? I swear on my life! Do you remember that pike? That’s why he let it slip through his fingers.”
“Look!” she cried out in her excitement. “It’s moving, it’s moving!”
She gave a tug, but she had caught nothing.
“It broke away!” said Kostyakov, looking at the rod. “Didn’t you see it snatch the worm? Must have been a big pike. But you haven’t got the knack, young lady: you didn’t let it get a good bite.”
“You mean, you need skill even for this?”
“Just like in anything,” he said, offering his stock response.
She was excited and turned round in a hurry, dropping her rod in the water in the process. But Alexander was already looking in the other direction.
“But what do you have to do to get the skill?”
“You need to get more practice,” replied Kostyakov.
“Oh, so that’s it!” she thought, as pleased as punch. “That means, I need to come here more often – I understand! Very well, I will, but I will be tormenting you, Mister boor, in return for all your rudeness.”
Thus it was coquetry which conveyed Alexander’s answer to her, even though on that day he didn’t actually say one word more to her.
“God knows what on earth she’ll be thinking!” he said to himself. “She’ll be putting on airs, and putting on an act of some kind… so stupid!”
From that day on, the old man and his daughter started coming every day. Sometimes Liza would come without her father, but with her nanny. She would bring some work with her, and some books, and sit under a tree, ostensibly quite indifferent to Alexander’s presence.
Her idea was to hurt his pride – or, as she would put it, to “torment him”. She would chat audibly with her nanny about household matters in order to give the impression that she didn’t even see Aduyev. But he in actual fact didn’t see her – or, if he did, would bow curtly, without a word. When she saw that this tactic was getting her nowhere, she changed her plan of attack, and a couple of times actually started a conversation with him; sometimes even borrowing his rod. Little by little Alexander started to be a little more talkative, but was careful not to say anything indiscreet. Whether this was a stratagem on his part, or whether, as he would put it, “nothing had healed his old wounds”, the fact remained that he treated her and spoke to her without any warmth.
One day, the old man ordered a samovar to be brought to the riverbank. Liza was pouring tea. Alexander stubbornly refused the tea, saying that he did not drink tea in the evening.
What he was thinking to himself was, “This whole business of tea-drinking brings people closer and helps them to get to know each other – I won’t do it!”
“What are you talking about? Why, only yesterday you drank four glasses!” said Kostyakov.
“No, it’s in the open air that I don’t drink tea,” Alexander hastened to add.
“Rubbish!” said Kostyakov. “This tea is great, top quality – must have cost fifteen roubles. Pour me a little more, young lady – and a little rum wouldn’t hurt!”
So rum was brought.
The old man invited Alexander home, but he flatly refused. Hearing him refuse, Liza pouted and demanded to know his reason for being so unsociable. But no matter how ski
lfully she steered the conversation round to this subject, Alexander even more skilfully dodged it.
This mysteriousness only excited Liza’s curiosity, and perhaps even another feeling. Her face, which had previously been as clear as a summer sky, began to cloud over with concern and look troubled. Often she would look at Alexander with sadness in her eyes, and then lower them and look at the ground, as if she were thinking, “You must be unhappy! Perhaps you’ve been jilted… Oh, how happy I could make you! How well I would care for you… love you! I would protect you from fate itself, I would!…” and so on and so forth.
This is how most women think, just as most women deceive those who are taken in by this siren’s song. Alexander appeared to notice none of this. He would talk to her as if he were talking to one of his friends, or his uncle, without that trace of affection which inevitably creeps into any friendship between a man and a woman, which makes the relationship between them something akin to friendship. That is why people say that friendship between a man and a woman is impossible, and that which is described as “friendship” is nothing more or less than either the beginning of love or the remains of it – or, indeed, ultimately love itself. But anyone observing the way Aduyev and Liza treated each other might have believed that this kind of friendship does in fact exist.
Only once did he show any sign of even partly opening up to her. He picked up from the bench a book which she had brought him, and leafed through it. It was Childe Harold* in the French translation. Alexander shook his head, sighed and silently put the book down again.
“You don’t like Byron? You have something against him?” she asked. “Byron is such a great poet – and you don’t like him?”
“I haven’t said a thing, and here you are attacking me,” he replied.
“Why were you shaking your head like that?”
“Oh, just that it’s a pity that book fell into your hands.”
“Were you feeling sorry for the book or for me?”
Alexander remained silent.
“Why shouldn’t I read Byron?”
“For two reasons,” said Alexander after a moment’s silence. He put his hand on hers in order to make his point more forcibly – or maybe because her hand was so white and soft, and began to speak softly and unhurriedly, running his eyes over her hair, her neck and her waist in turn. The longer he went on doing this, the louder became his voice.
“Firstly,” he said, because you are reading Byron in French, and thus losing the beauty and power of the poet’s voice. Just take a look at this pale, flat, insipid language. That’s just the ashes of the great poet: it’s as if his ideas have been watered down. And the second reason is that I wouldn’t recommend that you read Byron because… well, he may set off vibrations within you which may never have been stirred otherwise.”
At this point, he squeezed her hand firmly and expressively, as if by doing so he would lend weight to his words.
“But why should you read Byron anyway?” he continued. “Perhaps your life will flow along as gently as this stream; you see how small and shallow it is – too small to reflect the whole sky or the clouds; there are no cliffs around, no crags; it burbles merrily along – and barely a ripple ruffles its surface now and then. All it reflects is the foliage lining the banks, a patch of the sky and a cloud here and there… and this, most likely, is the course your life would take – but you go out of your way to court unnecessary trouble and turbulence; you prefer to look at life through a glass darkly… Leave it alone, don’t read this kind of thing! Look at everything with a smile, don’t look too far ahead, live for the day, don’t seek to discover the dark side of life and people – otherwise!…”
“Otherwise, what?”
“Nothing!” said Alexander, appearing to recollect himself.
“No, tell me, you’ve been through some kind of experience, haven’t you?”
“Where’s my rod? I’m sorry, I have to go.”
He looked a little put out at having expressed himself incautiously.
“No; one more thing,” Liza put in. “I mean, a poet must try to elicit the reader’s sympathy. Byron is a great poet: why are you against my sympathizing with him? Am I really so stupid, so shallow that I can’t understand?…”
She was offended.
“Not exactly; sympathize with what’s natural in your woman’s heart; look for what’s in harmony with it, otherwise there will be a frightful dissonance… both in your head and in your heart.”
He shook his head, the gesture suggesting that he himself was a victim of this dissonance.
“One person will show you a flower,” he went on to say, “and make you enjoy its fragrance and beauty; another person will only point out the poisonous pith in its chalice… and that flower will lose all its fragrance and beauty for you. He will make you feel sorry that that pith is there, and you will forget about the fragrance that is also present. There is a difference between those two people and the kinds of sympathy they will arouse in you. Don’t look for the poison, don’t try to dig for the root of everything that happens to us and around us, and don’t try to acquire unnecessary experience – that is not what will make you happy.”
He said nothing more. She had listened to him attentively and trustingly.
“Please go on, please go on,” she said like a child in a classroom. “I could listen to you for days on end and comply with everything you say…”
“Me?” said Alexander without warmth. “Come now! What right do I have to influence you? I’m sorry I said what I said. Read whatever you choose… Childe Harold is a very good book, and Byron is a great poet!”
“No, stop pretending! Don’t talk like that. Tell me, what should I read?”
He started recommending to her in a sententious and didactic manner various works of history and travel, but she said that she had had enough of all that in school. So then he proposed Walter Scott, Cooper* and some French and English writers, male and female, as well as two or three Russian authors, attempting in this way to display – quite incidentally, of course – his literary taste and refinement. That was their last conversation of that kind.
Alexander was anxious to escape. “What are women to me?” he thought to himself. “I’m incapable of love, I’ve put all that behind me.”
“That’s all very well!” said Kostyakov. “But you’ll find yourself getting married anyway, you’ll see. In my time all I wanted to do was to play around with the young girls and even the older ones, but when the time came for walking up the aisle, I felt as if a stake was being driven into my head; like someone was frogmarching me to the altar!”
But Alexander didn’t make good his escape. He felt his former dreams beginning to stir within him. His heart began to beat at a faster rate. He could not shake off the visions of Liza’s waist, her small foot and her tresses, and life became a little brighter. For the last three days, it had not been Kostyakov who had invited him to go fishing, but it was he who had dragged Kostyakov there. “It’s beginning all over again,” Alexander said to himself, “but I’m resolved!” – and meanwhile hurried down to the river.
Every day, Liza waited impatiently for the arrival of the two friends, and every evening a cup of fragrant tea with rum was poured for Kostyakov. And it was to this stratagem that Liza at least partly owed the fact that the two friends never missed a single evening. When they were late, Liza and her father would walk part of the way to meet them. When bad weather kept the two friends at home, the next day they, as well as the weather, came in for endless recriminations.
Alexander thought and thought, and made up his mind to suspend these outings for a while for God knows what reason – he certainly didn’t know himself – and didn’t go fishing for a whole week; and nor did Kostyakov. Finally they started going again.
About a mile before they reached the spot, they met Liza and her nanny. The moment she spotted them, an involunt
ary scream escaped her, and her face turned red with embarrassment. Alexander bowed stiffly, but Kostyakov started in right away.
“Here we are, and I bet you didn’t expect us,” he said. “Yes,” he said with a laugh, “I can see you weren’t expecting us – there’s no samovar! It’s quite a while since we met last! Is anything biting? I was always wanting to come, but couldn’t persuade Alexander Fyodorych; all he wanted to do was to sit at home – or should I say ‘lie down’?”
She gave Aduyev a reproachful look.
“What does this mean?” she asked.
“What does what mean?”
“You didn’t come for a whole week?”
“Yes, I believe it was a whole week.”
“Why not?”
“No reason, I just didn’t feel like it.”
“Didn’t feel like it!” she said in surprise.
“Yes, and what about it?”
She remained silent, but it seemed that she was thinking, “Can you really not have felt like coming?”
“I wanted to send Daddy into town to see you,” she said, “but I didn’t know where you lived.”
“Into town – to see me? Why?”
“What kind of question is that?” she said indignantly. “Why? To find out what had happened to you; whether you were ill or something.”
“But what’s it to you?”
“What’s it to me, my God!”
“Why ‘my God’?”
“What do you mean, ‘why’?… Well, I mean, I have your books…” She was at a loss for words. “Not to come for a whole week!” she finally added.
The Same Old Story Page 32
