Ryabovich looked apathetically at all those necks and faces in front and behind. At any other time he would have dozed off, but now he was immersed in new, pleasant thoughts. When the brigade had first set off, he had tried to convince himself that the incident of the kiss was only some unimportant, mysterious adventure and that essentially it was trivial and too ridiculous for serious thought. But very quickly he waved logic aside and gave himself up to his dreams. First he pictured himself in von Rabbeck’s drawing-room, sitting next to a girl who resembled both the girl in lilac and the blonde in black. Then he closed his eyes and imagined himself with another, completely strange girl, with very indeterminate features: in his thoughts he spoke to her, caressed her and leaned his head on her shoulder. Then he thought of war and separation, reunion, dinner with his wife and children…
‘Brakes on!’ rang out the command every time they went downhill. He shouted the command too, and feared that his own shouts would shatter his daydreams and bring him back to reality.
As they passed some estate, Ryabovich peeped over the fence into the garden. There he saw a long avenue, straight as a ruler, strewn with yellow sand and lined with young birches. With the eagerness of a man who has surrendered himself to daydreaming, he imagined tiny female feet walking over the yellow sand. And, quite unexpectedly, he had a clear mental picture of the girl who had kissed him, the girl he had visualized the previous evening during dinner. This image had planted itself in his mind and would not leave him.
At midday someone shouted from a wagon in the rear, ‘Attention, eyes left! Officers!’
The brigadier drove up in an open carriage drawn by two white horses. He ordered it to stop near the second battery and shouted something no one understood. Several officers galloped over to him, Ryabovich among them.
‘Well, what’s the news?’ asked the brigadier, blinking his red eyes. ‘Anyone ill?’
When they had replied, the brigadier, a small skinny man, chewed for a moment, pondered and then turned to one of the officers: ‘One of your drivers, on the third gun, has taken his knee-guard off and the devil’s hung it on the fore-carriage. Reprimand him!’
He looked up at Ryabovich and continued: ‘It strikes me your harness breeches are too long.’
After a few more tiresome comments, the brigadier glanced at Lobytko and grinned. ‘You look down in the dumps today, Lieutenant Lobytko. Pining for Madame Lopukhov, eh? Gentlemen, he’s pining for Madame Lopukhov!’
Madame Lopukhov was a very plump, tall lady, well past forty. The brigadier, who had a passion for large women, no matter what age, suspected his officers nurtured similar passions. They smiled politely. Then the brigadier, delighted with himself for having made a very amusing, cutting remark, roared with laughter, tapped his driver on the back and saluted. The carriage drove off.
‘All the things I’m dreaming about now and which seem impossible, out of this world, are in fact very ordinary,’ Ryabovich thought as he watched the clouds of dust rising in the wake of the brigadier’s carriage. ‘It’s all so very ordinary, everyone experiences it… The brigadier, for example. He was in love once, now he’s married, with children. Captain Vachter is married and loved, despite having an extremely ugly red neck and no waistline. Salmanov is coarse and too much of a Tartar, but he had an affair that finished in marriage. I’m the same as everyone else… sooner or later I’ll have to go through what they did…’
And he was delighted and encouraged by the thought that he was just an ordinary man, leading an ordinary life. Now he was bold enough to picture her and his happiness as much as he liked and he gave full rein to his imagination.
In the evening, when the brigade had reached its destination and the officers were resting in their tents, Ryabovich, Merzlyakov and Lobytko gathered round a trunk and had supper. Merzlyakov took his time, holding his European Herald on his knees and reading it as he slowly munched his food.
Lobytko could not stop talking and kept filling his glass with beer, while Ryabovich, whose head was rather hazy from dreaming all day long, said nothing as he drank. Three glasses made him tipsy and weak and he felt an irrepressible longing to share his new feelings with his friends.
‘A strange thing happened to me at the Rabbecks,’ he said, trying to sound cool and sarcastic. ‘I went to the billiard-room, you know…’
He began to tell them, in great detail, all about the kiss, but after a minute fell silent. In that one minute he had told them everything and he was astonished when he considered how little time was needed to tell his story: he had imagined it would take until morning. After he heard the story, Lobytko – who was a great liar and therefore a great sceptic – looked at him in disbelief and grinned. Merzlyakov twitched his eyebrows and kept his eyes glued to the European Herald as he calmly remarked, ‘Damned if I know what to make of it! Throwing herself round a stranger’s neck without saying a word first… She must have been a mental case…’
‘Yes, some kind of neurotic,’ Ryabovich agreed.
‘Something similar happened to me once,’ Lobytko said, assuming a frightened look. ‘Last year I was travelling to Kovno… second class. The compartment was chock-full and it was impossible to sleep. So I tipped the guard fifty copeks… he took my luggage and got me a berth in a sleeper. I lay down and covered myself with a blanket. It was dark, you understand. Suddenly someone was touching my shoulder and breathing into my face. So I moved my arm and felt an elbow. I opened my eyes and – can you imagine! – it was a woman. Black eyes, lips as red as the best salmon, nostrils breathing passion, breasts like buffers!…’
‘Just a minute,’ Merzlyakov calmly interrupted. ‘I don’t dispute what you said about her breasts, but how could you see her lips if it was dark?’
Lobytko tried to wriggle out by poking fun at Merzlyakov’s obtuseness and this jarred on Ryabovich. He went away from the trunk, lay down and vowed never again to tell his secrets.
Camp life fell back into its normal routine. The days flashed by, each exactly the same as the other. All this time Ryabovich felt, thought and behaved like someone in love. When his batman brought him cold water in the mornings, he poured it over his head and each time he remembered that there was something beautiful and loving in his life.
In the evenings, when his fellow-officers talked about love and women, he would listen very attentively, sitting very close to them and assuming the habitual expression of a soldier hearing stories about battles he himself fought in. On those evenings when senior officers, led by ‘setter’ Lobytko, carried out ‘sorties’ on the local village, in true Don Juan style, Ryabovich went along with them and invariably returned feeling sad, deeply guilty and imploring her forgiveness. In his spare time, or on nights when he couldn’t sleep, when he wanted to recall his childhood days, his parents, everything that was near and dear to him, he would always find himself thinking of Mestechki instead, of that strange horse, of von Rabbeck and his wife, who looked like the Empress Eugénie, of that dark room with the bright chink in the door.
On 31 August he left camp – not with his own brigade, however, but with two batteries. All the way he daydreamed and became very excited, as though he were going home. He wanted passionately to see that strange horse again, the church, those artificial Rabbecks, the dark room. Some inner voice, which so often deceives those in love, whispered that he was bound to see her again. And he was tormented by such questions as: how could he arrange a meeting, what would she say, had she forgotten the kiss? If the worst came to the worst, he would at least have the pleasure of walking through that dark room and remembering…
Towards evening, that familiar church and the white barns appeared on the horizon. His heart began to pound. He did not listen to what the officer riding next to him was saying, he was oblivious of everything and looked eagerly at the river gleaming in the distance, at the loft above which pigeons were circling in the light of the setting sun.
As he rode up to the church and heard the quartermaster speaking, he expected a
messenger on horseback to appear from behind the fence any minute and invite the officers to tea… but the quartermaster read the billeting list out, the officers dismounted and strolled off into the village – and no messenger came.
‘The people in the village will tell Rabbeck we’re here and he’ll send for us,’ Ryabovich thought as he went into his hut. He just could not understand why a fellow-officer was lighting a candle, why the batmen were hurriedly heating the samovars.
He was gripped by an acute feeling of anxiety. He lay down, then got up and looked out of the window to see if the messenger was coming. But there was no one. He lay down again but got up again after half an hour, unable to control his anxiety, went out into the street and strode off towards the church.
The square near the fence was dark and deserted. Some soldiers were standing in a row at the top of the slope, saying nothing. They jumped when they saw Ryabovich and saluted. He acknowledged the salute and went down the familiar path.
The entire sky over the far bank was flooded with crimson; the moon was rising. Two peasant women were talking loudly and picking cabbage leaves as they walked along the edge of a kitchen garden. Beyond the gardens were some dark huts. On the near bank everything was much the same as in May: the path, the bushes, the willows overhanging the river… only there was no bold nightingale singing, no fragrant poplars or young grass. Ryabovich reached the garden and peered over the gate. It was dark and quiet and all he could see were the white trunks of the nearest birches and here and there little patches of avenue – everything else had merged into one black mass. Ryabovich looked hard, listened eagerly, and after standing and waiting for about a quarter of an hour, without hearing a sound or seeing a single light, he trudged wearily away…
He went down to the river, where he could see the general’s bathing-hut and towels hanging over the rail on the little bridge. He went on to the bridge, stood for a moment and aimlessly fingered the towels. They felt cold and rough. He looked down at the water… the current was swift and purled, barely audibly, against the piles of the hut. The red moon was reflected in the water near the left bank; tiny waves rippled through the reflection, pulling it apart and breaking it up into little patches, as if trying to bear it away.
‘How stupid, how very stupid!’ Ryabovich thought as he looked at the fast-flowing water. Now, when he hoped for nothing, that adventure of the kiss, his impatience, his vague longings and disillusionment appeared in a new light. He didn’t think it at all strange that he hadn’t waited for the general’s messenger or that he would never see the girl who had kissed him by mistake. On the contrary, he would have thought it strange if he had seen her…
The water raced past and he did not know where or why; it had flowed just as swiftly in May, when it grew from a little stream into a large river, flowed into the sea, evaporated and turned into rain. Perhaps this was the same water flowing past. To what purpose?
And the whole world, the whole of life, struck Ryabovich as a meaningless, futile joke. As he turned his eyes from the water to the sky, he remembered how fate had accidentally caressed him – in the guise of an unknown woman. He recalled the dreams and visions of that summer and his life seemed terribly empty, miserable, colourless… When he returned to his hut, none of the officers was there.
The batman reported that they had all gone to ‘General Fontryabkin’s’ – he’d sent a messenger on horseback with the invitation. There was a brief flicker of joy in his heart, but he snuffed it out at once, lay on his bed and in defiance of fate – as though he wanted to bring its wrath down on his own head – he did not go to the general’s.
Verochka
Ivan Alekseyevich Ognyov remembers how the French windows rattled as he opened them that August evening and went out onto the verandah. Then he was wearing a light cape1 and the broad-brimmed straw hat that now lay under his bed gathering dust with his topboots. In one hand he held a large bundle of books and notebooks, in the other a stout, knotty walking-stick.
In the doorway, lighting the way with a lamp, stood Kuznetsov his host, a bald old man with a long grey beard and wearing a snow-white piqué jacket. The old man was smiling and nodding benevolently.
‘Goodbye, old chap!’ Ognyov shouted to him.
Kuznetsov put the lamp on a small table and came out onto the verandah. Two long narrow shadows swept down the steps towards the flowerbeds, swayed for a moment and bumped their heads against the trunks of the lime trees.
‘Goodbye – and thanks again, my dear fellow!’ Ivan Alekseyevich said. ‘Thanks for your generosity, your kindness, your affection… I shan’t forget your hospitality as long as I live. You’re such a good person, your daughter’s so nice, everyone here’s so kind, cheerful, generous… Really, such wonderful people that I’m lost for words!’
Carried away by his feelings and the effects of the home-made liqueurs he had just drunk, Ognyov spoke in a singing voice, like a theology student, and he was so touched that he expressed his emotions not so much in words as by blinking his eyes and twitching his shoulders. Kuznetsov, who was also slightly tipsy and overcome with emotion, leaned towards the young man and kissed him.
‘I’ve become so used to you – it’s as if I were your gun-dog!’ Ognyov continued. ‘I’ve been coming here nearly every day and stayed overnight a dozen times. I’ve drunk so much of your liqueurs it doesn’t bear thinking about! But what I have to thank you for most of all, Gavriil Petrovich, is for your help and cooperation. Without you I would have been busy with my statistics here until October. And that’s just what I’m going to put in my preface: “It is my duty to express my gratitude to Kuznetsov, President of N— District Council for his kind assistance.” Statistics has a brill-i-ant future!2 My profound respects to Vera Gavrilovna and please tell the doctors, the two magistrates and your secretary that I shall never forget their help. And now, old friend, let’s embrace and kiss for the last time!’
Limp with emotion, Ognyov kissed the old man again and started going down the steps. On the bottom step he turned round.
‘Shall we ever meet again?’
‘God knows!’ the old man replied. ‘Probably not!’
‘Yes, that’s true. Nothing will induce you to go to St Petersburg and it’s hardly likely I’ll ever come back to this district. Well – goodbye!’
‘Why don’t you leave your books here?’ Kuznetsov shouted after him. ‘Why drag all that weight around? I could send them over tomorrow with one of the servants.’
But Ognyov was listening no longer and he quickly walked away from the house. Warmed by the liqueurs, at heart he felt glowing, cheerful – and sad. On the way he thought how often in life one chances to meet splendid people and what a pity it was that all that is left of these encounters is memories. It is the same when one glimpses some cranes on the horizon and a gentle gust of wind carries their mournfully exultant cries towards you. But a moment later, however eagerly you peer into the blue distance, you cannot see one speck or hear one sound – so people’s faces and voices flash through our lives and are swallowed up by the past, leaving nothing but worthless scraps of memories. Having lived since early spring in N— district and visited the amiable Kuznetsovs almost every day, Ivan Ognyov had come to look upon the old man, his daughter, the servants as his own family; he had become familiar with every little detail of that house, the cosy verandah, the winding garden paths, the silhouettes of the trees over the kitchen and the bath-house. But the moment he passed through the garden gate all this would become but a memory, losing for him its meaning as part of reality for ever, and after one or two years all these cherished images would grow dim in his mind and fade together with the fruits and fancies of his imagination.
‘Nothing in life is as precious as people!’ thought Ognyov, deeply moved as he strode along the path towards the gate. ‘Nothing!’
It was still and warm in the garden. A scent of still-blossoming mignonette, tobacco plant and heliotrope wafted from the flowerbeds. The spaces between the
shrubs and tree trunks were filled with delicate, filmy mist saturated with moonlight; what Ognyov remembered for long afterwards were the spectral wisps of mist which were slowly but perceptibly following each other across the paths. The moon stood high above the garden and beneath it transparent patches of mist were hurrying eastwards. The whole world seemed to consist solely of black silhouettes and wandering white shadows. Seeing the mist on a moonlit August night almost for the first time in his life, Ognyov thought that it was not nature that he was witnessing but a stage set, where some clumsy pyrotechnists, intending to illumine the garden with Bengal lights, had concealed themselves in the shrubs and were discharging clouds of white smoke together with their flares.
As Ognyov approached the garden gate a dark shadow moved away from the low fence to meet him.
‘Vera Gavrilovna!’ he joyfully exclaimed. ‘It’s you! I’ve been looking for you everywhere… I wanted to say goodbye… Well, goodbye then, I’m leaving.’
‘So early? It’s only eleven o’clock.’
‘Well, it’s time I went. I’ve a three-mile walk and I haven’t even packed yet. I have to be up early tomorrow.’
Before Ognyov stood Kuznetsov’s daughter Vera, a girl of twenty-one, sad-faced as usual, carelessly dressed and most attractive. Young women who daydream a great deal and who spend days lying around lazily reading whatever comes to hand, who are bored and melancholy, generally tend to dress carelessly. To those of them whom nature has endowed with taste and a feeling for beauty this slight carelessness lends its own special charm. At least, when Ognyov later recalled pretty Verochka, he couldn’t picture her without that loose-fitting blouse that hung creased in deep folds at the waist without touching her body, or that curl which had come loose from her piled-up hair onto her brow, or that red knitted shawl with the shaggy bobbles at the edges that was sadly draped over Verochka’s shoulders in the evenings like a flag in calm weather, lying crumpled up during the day in the hall near the men’s caps or on the chest in the dining-room and unceremoniously slept on by the old cat. That shawl and those creases in her blouse conveyed a feeling of idle ease, domesticity and placidity. Perhaps it was because he liked Vera that he saw in every button and frill something warm, cosy and innocent, something fine and poetic – just what was lacking in cold, insincere women with no feeling for beauty.
The Steppe and Other Stories, 1887-91 Page 18
