The Flight

by Gaito Gazdanov

  As they reached the shore, they spotted Yegorkin, who, in a faded bathing costume, was standing up to his knees in the sea, splashing himself with water. From a distance Seryozha could see his gaunt body with its jutting ribs and a tuft of grey hair on his chest, poking out from under his maillot.

  “Hello, Leonid Semyonovich. How are you? Have you come for a swim?”

  “Hello, Yelizaveta Alexandrovna. Hello, Seryozha,” said Yegorkin, straightening himself up and bowing. “Have you had a nice swim?”

  “Thank you, Leonid Semyonovich,” said Liza in a more cordial voice than usual. “We’ve enjoyed ourselves.”

  “I just can’t seem to get the hang of it,” said Yegorkin. “I’m afeared of the water. The minute I know there’s nothing under my feet, terror strikes.”

  “I’ll teach you,” said Seryozha. “First, you need to learn to hold your head underwater.”

  “Good grief, Seryozha, how on earth will I breathe?”

  “Just watch. You take a deep breath, then plunge your head in the water and breathe out through your nostrils. Like this.”

  Standing on his knees, Seryozha ducked his head under the water, and bubbles of air rose gurgling to the surface. Yegorkin, stooping over, watched intently.

  “No, if I did that, they’d have to give me the kiss of life after,” he said.

  “But it’s easy.”

  “I didn’t say it wasn’t easy, Seryozha. But dying’s not exactly difficult either.”

  “All right, let’s be off then, Leonid Semyonovich,” said Seryozha. Liza had already taken a few steps in the direction of the house. “We’ll lunch at home.”

  Seryozha waited while Yegorkin dressed, and together they went out onto the terrace. Meeting Chef along the way, Seryozha asked him to let his mother know that there would be an additional person for lunch. Yegorkin waited alone on the terrace while Seryozha went to his room to dress. Ten minutes later the three of them were sitting at the table.

  “It’s strange, the way things turn out,” said Yegorkin. “I more or less grew up on the Volga, I’ve an aunt in Saratov who married a vet. I’d go down to the river with the lads, they could all swim, but somehow I never could learn. So many years have been and gone, and still I don’t know how. It can’t be helped: I’m no swimmer, and that’s that.”

  Liza remained silent. Seryozha said:

  “So you lived in Saratov? And here I am, Leonid Semyonovich, a Russian, although I’ve practically never seen Russia. I remember the Crimea a little, as though in a dream.”

  “Yes, I know the Volga well,” said Yegorkin. “My aunt was a lovely woman, just a bit heavy-handed.”

  “In what sense?”

  “The meaning’s clear enough,” said Yegorkin, smiling his artless, simple smile. “She never touched us children, but her husband could be sure of getting it.”

  “For what?”

  “He… Let’s say he drank a little. Well, she was a nervous woman, but she’d still give him what for. She was forever shouting at him. ‘You may be a vet,’ she’d say, ‘but you’ve drunk so much you can’t tell a horse from a cow,’ she’d say.”

  “Did he drink often?”

  “No, once a month he’d drink for two days solid,” said Yegorkin. “He was a quiet man, an angler, always fishing. And there’s as many fish in the Volga as you could want. I’m no expert, but I once caught a fifteen-pound pike.”

  Seryozha laughed.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “Don’t take offence,” replied Seryozha, continuing to laugh, “I’m just in high spirits today. You mentioned a pike, and it reminded me of a few fishing and hunting tales.”

  “A tale!” said Yegorkin. “That would be a fine thing! A tale indeed… I almost lost my life because of it.”

  “Because of the pike?”

  “Of course because of the pike. The damned thing thrashed around so much that I fell into the water, dressed as I was.”

  “What happened then?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t let go of the rod and managed to grab onto a tree overhanging the water. Then the lads came and helped me out, and I reeled it in.”

  “Fifteen pounds—how much is that in kilos?”

  “Almost eight.”

  “What other fish have you caught, Leonid Semyonovich?”

  “Lots, Seryozha, only I never fished much. My uncle spent his whole life fishing—knew every kind of fish, all their habits, all the places they lived, and how best to catch them. He was a real expert.”

  “You’d need devilish patience, I’d imagine,” said Seryozha.

  “Not patience, but character. Folks used to say that fishermen weren’t quite all there. Not dangerous, of course, but a queer sort. Though to my mind it’s better to go fishing than it is to sit in a pub.”

  “Undoubtedly, Leonid Semyonovich,” said Liza, who until now had been silent.

  Yegorkin became flustered, as he almost always did whenever Liza entered the conversation. She was the only person he knew whose presence almost pained him; every time he would somehow get into a muddle and begin to feel uncomfortable, although objectively he held her mind and her beauty in very high regard, as he was wont to say. She clearly belonged to another world, one that was inaccessible to him; and just as this difference seemed insignificant or unimportant to him whenever he was dealing with Sergey Sergeyevich, or Olga Alexandrovna, or Seryozha, so did it become all too apparent when dealing with Liza. He was unable to explain it, but this feeling of his had remained unchanged for many years already. Whenever he was in her presence, it would suddenly occur to him that he was perhaps not dressed as he should be, not saying what he was supposed to say, not sitting at the table just so—all in all, not the man he ought to have been in order not to feel this embarrassment. With Seryozha, on the other hand, he felt entirely at ease.

  To change the topic of conversation, he began recalling how he had sold his first paintings to Sergey Sergeyevich:

  “Do you remember, Yelizaveta Alexandrovna,” he said, “it was the year that you and Sergey Sergeyevich first came here to spend the summer together. You must have been around seven, Seryozha, no more; although I met you only the year after. But Sergey Sergeyevich and Yelizaveta Alexandrovna spent a month and a half here together.”

  Liza’s eyes widened; she obviously wanted to say something, but held her tongue.

  “Back then,” continued Yegorkin, “when I first set eyes on the two of you, I thought to myself: ‘Can they really be Russians?’ Then I followed you while you were walking, listening, but you weren’t speaking Russian or French. Must’ve been wrong, I thought. But then Sergey Sergeyevich suddenly said, ‘It’s all ignorant contrivance!’ in Russian. It brought joy to my heart.”

  And so Yegorkin told the tale of how he first spoke to Sergey Sergeyevich. The day was overcast, which was rare for that time of year: Yegorkin was sitting by a solitary path, having set out his paints, working. The steps he had heard a few seconds before halted behind him. He turned around and saw a man wearing a white suit, the same man who had arrived several days earlier with a young woman in a gleaming new motor car, the same man who had been speaking about ignorant contrivance.

  “Are you painting the sea?” asked Sergey Sergeyevich.

  “As you can see,” said Yegorkin, turning on his homemade stool with a sweeping gesture. One of the legs, however, was significantly shorter than the others, which made it very unsteady, and because of the sharp movement Yegorkin toppled over along with the stool. Sergey Sergeyevich helped him up, laughing all the while.

  “Wherever did you get that stool?” he asked, smiling. “Its centre of gravity is off.”

  “The trick is to make it yourself,” replied Yegorkin.

  “What parts do you hail from?” asked Sergey Sergeyevich without any transition.

  “Tambov province,” replied Yegorkin.

  “You’ve come a long way,” said Sergey Sergeyevich. “Are you a professional artist or a mere enthusiast, as it were
?”

  Yegorkin explained that he was an artist, that at one time he had specialized in icons, which were in great demand among Russians—mostly icons of that most national of saints, St Nicholas the Wonderworker. Sergey Sergeyevich laughed.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “Nicholas was a Greek,” said Sergey Sergeyevich. “But it doesn’t matter. Do go on. So, you say religious works are in demand?”

  Yegorkin said he had painted the icons from memory, just as he had seen them in Russian churches. Then he moved on to portraiture, which, however, would satisfy neither him nor those who commissioned them: him, because he had been unable to achieve the necessary likeness, and the sitter—and in particular the women—because they invariably desired to look much more handsome in their portraits than they did in real life. One former lady writer had caused Yegorkin particular trouble.

  “What was her surname?” asked Sergey Sergeyevich.

  Yegorkin replied.

  “I recall,” said Sergey Sergeyevich. “She wrote some pornographic nonsense. Go on.”

  She had told Yegorkin that she was personally acquainted with Repin and Vrubel, that Yegorkin could not hold a candle to them and that his portrait was terrible and she would not pay, since he had not painted it as he ought to have done. She showed him a photograph taken twenty years previously, in which she was a rather attractive lady of forty holding a fan in her very crooked right hand; she said that this was her true portrait, and set about convincing Yegorkin that his work had nothing in common with this photograph, which was self-evident. When Yegorkin said the photograph had been taken God only knew when, she flew into a rage and refused to pay; however, she held on to the portrait all the same. Yegorkin never received a penny, despite having spent much time and effort on the painting.

  From Yegorkin’s talk it became clear that his affairs were by and large in catastrophically bad shape, although he never thought to complain about it: for him it was just the way of things.

  At the end of the conversation Sergey Sergeyevich remarked to Yegorkin that he himself was a lover of original art and that he would gladly acquire several paintings if there were any for sale.

  “Good heavens!” said Yegorkin, beside himself with joy. “Take anything you want.”

  On the following day he brought five paintings to show to Sergey Sergeyevich, which the latter acquired on the spot for a very modest sum. But then, in hushed tones, he told the artist that he must always ask for more, that the people who buy paintings most often know nothing about art and judge it according to the price: if it is expensive, it must be good. Subsequently, however, Yegorkin successfully applied this principle only with Sergey Sergeyevich; the prices had a deterrent effect on everyone else, although one day a young student of one of the Californian universities, who had won a large sum of money at Monte Carlo and then spent almost three whole days in a state of inebriation, bought from Yegorkin on the second day of this profligate debauchery, without bartering, almost all of his paintings, after which Yegorkin left for Paris and stopped in a hotel, where he was robbed; he still managed to see the Louvre, only he had no idea how he would return south, but then he hit upon the idea of seeking out Sergey Sergeyevich, who gave him the money for the journey. Yegorkin had managed to keep the other half of his fortune back in the Midi, and, upon returning there, he proceeded to live on it for two years: he was an unassuming and undemanding person, who could never be called extravagant; however, like many such self-denying people, he had no idea how to manage his money.

  Lunch had long finished, but still Yegorkin was recounting stories. Seryozha listened to him with fascination; Liza soon left and reappeared half an hour later, having changed into her clothes for town. Seryozha looked at her in astonishment.

  “Have you forgotten that we have to go to Nice?” she asked.

  “What, you’re planning to go to Nice? I didn’t think there was anywhere we needed to go.”

  “That just goes to show how bad your memory is. Go and get dressed. You’ll forgive us, Leonid Semyonovich, I hope.”

  “Forgive me, Yelizaveta Alexandrovna, forgive me. I’ve outstayed my welcome. A very good day to you.”

  When Seryozha came down, Chef called him aside and asked his permission to go with them to Nice.

  “Of course,” said Seryozha. “Do you have business there?”

  “I have a rendezvous,” said Chef. “You ought to catch my meaning.”

  “Why me, exactly?”

  “Because if you think I’m blind, you’re quite mistaken,” said Chef.

  “All right, you can come with us,” called Seryozha, heading towards the garage.

  They took Chef as far as Nice, where he got out; then they drove on. When Seryozha asked Liza why she had wanted to go to Nice, she replied that she had not in fact planned to go, that she had thought up this trip to escape the eternal Yegorkin.

  “Why don’t you like him? He’s a good, very simple man.”

  “Oh, he’s simple enough, all right. But he vexes me.”

  “He’s so funny, so ingenuous, and very kind,” said Seryozha. “I remember he once came to play with me and brought me some sweets, although he never had any money. He probably went without food just to buy me something; it’s very much in his nature to do a thing like that.”

  “I don’t deny it. I just don’t find his company interesting. All these ridiculous stories about the Volga, about a pike, about his aunt who was married to a vet. It’s enough to make you cringe.”

  “Liza, you and I need to talk,” said Seryozha. Liza’s lips quivered, but Seryozha was oblivious to this.

  “I’m listening.”

  “Liza, I have reason to think, you see… How can I say this?”

  “Nous y voilà, je crois.* Speak, my boy.”

  “You see, I think, that our relationship…”

  “That’s what I feared most of all,” she said with a sigh. Her face turned pale; she found it difficult to breathe. Her spontaneous alarm passed on to Seryozha.

  “Liza, what’s going to happen about all this?”

  “I don’t know, Seryozhenka. I know only—and I won’t hide it from you—that the worst is yet to come. Damn it,” she said suddenly, raising her head, “I also have a right to my own life and I don’t want to think about this. Don’t let’s talk about it, Seryozha. Kiss me.”

  Seryozha pressed her head to his shoulder and kissed it.

  “We’ll be a little more careful, that’s all. And when the time comes to answer for everything, I’ll answer for everything. Don’t think about it.”

  “All right, Liza.”

  Late at night, however, after Seryozha had fallen asleep, Liza lay awake, turning over in her mind everything she had given her word not to think about, everything she had forbidden Seryozha to think about. Strictly speaking, the catalyst for these thoughts, as before, had been Yegorkin’s gauche behaviour; he mentioned Sergey Sergeyevich at every opportunity, unaware of the degree to which it was agonizing for Liza. She knew that she loved Seryozha truly and powerfully. It even seemed to her as if that feeling of hers was unlike any other that had gone before it. She could not help being carried away by such a profound love for Seryozha, for whom everything existed only through her. Indeed, as far as he was concerned, there was nothing beyond her. At the same time, she asked herself whether she were capable of such a complete metamorphosis, of such total rejection of the past. Right now she did not doubt this, but what about five or ten years hence?

  Until now she had never known such an all-encompassing, joyous love—everything had always been transient, accidental, fleeting, everything with the exception of her long-standing relationship with Sergey Sergeyevich, who was in fact ultimately not a man but a machine; at times she began to hate him because he was perfectly devoid of spontaneity, everything was thought out, nothing was unexpected—all these phrases, humorous rejoinders, humorous meditations. “A machine, a machine,” she would say. Even physically, every muscle did exactly what it
was supposed to do, with an accurate, almost calculated tension. In all this time he had never once caused her any pain, never once said anything that could have truly offended her, although, undoubtedly, had he so desired, he could have found the necessary words for this, and thus, without any effort, his gentlemanliness would always irritate her. “Il n’a pas de mérite,” she would tell herself. “Il n’a rien à vaincre.”† As with the vast majority of women, Liza dreamt of a singular love her whole life; it was an almost unconscious desire: to experience a feeling wherein it was possible to dissolve, almost to disappear, almost to die and forget oneself; however, for this one needed a mighty jolt, a gentle maelstrom, some overwhelming action, the impossibility of living otherwise. Then she would regain her femininity; her uniqueness, her love of independence would vanish, her unwomanly muscles would soften and become weak, and generally there would be total degeneration: the former Liza, with her habitual restrained ire (for all this had yet to come, while time was marching on), with her abortive love affairs, in each of which she had sensed her own superiority over the male, with the constant emotional headache that Sergey Sergeyevich inflicted—this Liza would have ceased to exist and another would have come to replace her, a Liza unlike this one and infinitely happier than she.

  And now it had happened. Liza had long known about Seryozha’s feelings; she was too much a woman not to have understood what he himself, of course, had not yet realized. And because Seryozha was drawn to her, at first she felt only sweet alarm, but the moment came when she could no longer resist her own desire—two nights after they arrived there. When she kissed Seryozha and he fainted, she knew then that the most wonderful, the most important phase of her life was now beginning. Besides her love for Seryozha, which went beyond any considerations of whether he was suitable for her or she for him, she could not remain indifferent to his romantic, naive adoration, to his utter singularity, to his vulnerability. Far beyond these feelings, in the very depths and silence of her being, lurked the dark, seductive taste of something illicit. It was not the obvious, outward consideration that an affair between an aunt and her nephew was, in itself, ethically inadmissible. No, it was something indefinable but almost physical, something like a sense of this love’s incomparable astringency. No personal moral qualms could trouble Liza—and from this alone did she understand that she truly loved Seryozha. She thought about what was to come, and most of all she feared losing him. Despite all her power over him, she could not tell how Seryozha would react if he were to find out that she had been Sergey Sergeyevich’s lover for many years already. More than that, she feared Sergey Sergeyevich’s reaction, in whom, in this instance, she had not confided. Well, fine, she would explain to him that it was her happiness, her life, that without him she would die, that under no circumstances would she be parted from Seryozha. This would have no effect on Sergey Sergeyevich; he would say that in any other case he would have been happy for her, but now… On the other hand, it was impossible now to hide her relationship with Seryozha—she might have managed this, but Seryozha was so transparent that now everyone around him knew about it. What was to be done? Should they elope? That would mean ruining the boy’s whole life; come autumn, he was supposed to begin his studies in London; he was still a boy. How would they live if they eloped? By giving foreign-language lessons—only for Seryozha, ten years later, with faded eyes and a poorly dyed patch of grey hair, to realize that he had squandered his whole life because of this elderly woman? Yes, naturally Sergey Sergeyevich would offer to send money, but surely Seryozha would never consent to it. She felt a surge of hatred for Sergey Sergeyevich. This man knew what he was doing: neither Liza nor Olga Alexandrovna had any money of her own, and although Sergey Sergeyevich never denied them anything, they still had to ask him for money.