About Love and Other Stories Read online

  ‘Damn you…’ says Gusev angrily.

  Both he and the soldier quietly make their way up to the bow of the ship, then stand by the rail, looking silently up above and then down below. Up above is deep sky, clear stars, and silence, exactly like at home in the village, but down below there is darkness and disorder. For no fathomable reason the huge waves are making a lot of noise. Whichever wave you look at, each one tries to go higher than all the others, chasing after and pounding the one before it; a third, just as ferocious and wild, will fall upon it noisily, with its white mane shimmering.

  The sea has neither reason nor pity. If the steamship was smaller and not made of solid iron, the waves would have crushed it without the slighest feeling of remorse, devouring all the people without even bothering to sort saints from sinners. The steamship also has a senseless and cruel expression. The large-nosed monster is surging forward, cutting through millions of waves on its path; unperturbed by space and loneliness, it fears neither the darkness nor the wind; it simply does not care. If oceans had people, this monster would crush them and also not bother to sort saints from sinners.

  ‘Where are we now?’ asks Gusev.

  ‘I don’t know. In the ocean, I suppose.’

  ‘You can’t see land…’

  ‘Of course not! They say we will only see land in seven days time.’

  Both soldiers look at the white foam and its phosphorescent gleam, saying nothing and thinking. Gusev is the first to break the silence.

  ‘There is nothing to be frightened of,’ he says. ‘It’s just scary, like being stuck in a dark forest, but suppose they let down a boat on to the water right now and an officer ordered me to go fishing sixty miles away, I would go. Or say a Christian fell overboard right now— I’d go after him. I wouldn’t rescue a foreigner or a Chinese, but I’d save a Christian.’

  ‘Are you afraid of dying?’

  ‘I am. It’s my family I feel sorry for. My brother back home isn’t very responsible, you know; he drinks, he doesn’t honour our parents and he beats his wife up for no good reason. Everything will collapse without me, and my father and his old lady will end up begging, I know it. Actually, my legs are a bit wobbly and it’s a bit stuffy here… Let’s get some sleep…’

  V

  Gusev returns to the sick bay and lies down on his bunk. He is tormented like before with a vague desire for something, but he cannot work out what it is that he wants. His chest feels tight, his head is throbbing, and his mouth is so dry he can barely move his tongue. As he dozes he becomes delirious, and after being tormented by nightmares, coughing, and the lack of air, he finally falls into a deep sleep as morning approaches. He dreams that they have just taken the bread out of the oven at the barracks, and he has climbed into the oven as if it is a steam bath and is beating himself with birch twigs. He sleeps for two days, and on the third, at noon, two sailors come down to the sick bay and carry him out.

  They sew him up in sailcloth and put in a couple of iron weights to make him heavier. He starts to look like a carrot or a radish once he has been sewn up in the sailcloth: wide at the top where his head is and narrow at the bottom… They carry him up on deck before sunrise and put him on a plank; one end of the plank sits on the ship’s rail, and the other on a box which has been put on a stool. Discharged soldiers and the ship’s crew stand with their caps in their hands.

  ‘Blessed is the Lord,’ begins the priest; ‘now, always, and for ever more!’

  ‘Amen!’ sing three sailors.

  The discharged soldiers and the crew cross themselves and look out towards the waves. It is strange to think that a person has been sewn up in sailcloth and is about to go headlong into the waves. Could that really happen to anyone?

  After sprinkling Gusev with earth, the priest bows. They sing ‘Eternal Rest’.

  The sailor on duty lifts the end of the board, Gusev slides off it, plunges head-first, somersaults in the air, and—plop! The foam covers him, and for a moment he seems to be shrouded in lace, but the moment passes and he disappears beneath the waves.

  He descends quickly to the bottom. Will he go all the way? They say it is three miles to the bottom. After he has travelled about eight to ten fathoms, he starts going slower and slower, rocking gently from side to side as if deliberating; drawn by the current, he starts moving more sideways than straight down.

  And now on his journey he meets a shoal of little pilot fish. When they see the dark body, they stop dead in their tracks, then they suddenly all turn round and disappear. But within less than a minute they are homing in on Gusev again as swiftly as arrows, zigzagging around him…

  Then another dark body appears. It is a shark. It glides underneath Gusev grandly and nonchalantly, as if not noticing him, and Gusev lands on its back; it then turns belly up, basks in the warm, clear water and lazily opens its jaws, showing two rows of teeth. The pilot fish are thrilled; they stop and look to see what is going to happen next. The shark teases the body a little, then nonchalantly places its mouth underneath it, carefully grazes it with its teeth and the sailcloth is ripped along the whole length of the body from head to toe; one of the weights falls out and frightens the pilots by striking the shark on its side before descending quickly to the seabed.

  But meanwhile up above, clouds are clustering together over where the sun is rising; one cloud is like a triumphal arch, another like a lion, and a third like scissors… A broad green strip of light emerges from behind the clouds and stretches out to the middle of the sky; a little later a violet one joins it, then a gold one, then a pink one… The sky turns a delicate lilac colour. The ocean frowns at first as it looks at this magnificent, mesmerizing sky, but it too then takes on those tender, radiant, passionate colours which are difficult to describe in human terms.

  FISH LOVE

  Strange as it may seem, the solitary carp living in the pond near General Pantalykin’s dacha fell head over heels in love with Sonya Mamochkina, who had come to stay. But actually, what is so strange about that? Lermontov’s Demon fell in love with Tamara, * after all, and the swan fell in love with Leda, and do not bureaucrats sometimes fall in love with the daughters of their bosses? Sonya Mamochkina came to bathe every morning with her aunt. The love-struck carp swam along the water’s edge and watched. The water in the pond had long ago turned brown because of being next door to the Krandel and Sons foundry, but the carp could still see everything. He could see white clouds and birds in the blue sky, lady holidaymakers undressing and young men peeping at them from behind the bushes on the edge of the pond. He could also see the plump aunt, who would spend about five minutes sitting on a stone before going into the water, patting herself contentedly and saying: ‘Who do I take after to look like such an elephant? It’s awful just to look at me.’ After taking off the light clothes she was wearing, Sonya would rush into the water with a squeal and swim about, shivering with cold, and there would be the carp; he would swim up to her and begin greedily kissing her feet, her shoulders, her neck…

  After bathing, the holidaymakers would go home to have tea and buns, while the lonely carp would swim around the pond, thinking:

  ‘Of course there is absolutely no chance of reciprocation. Could such a beautiful woman fall in love with me, a carp? No, a thousand times no! Don’t tempt yourself with dreams, you contemptible fish! Only one destiny awaits you—death! But how to die? There aren’t any revolvers or phosphorous matches in the pond. There is only one death open to carp and that is via the jaws of a pike. But where can I get hold of a pike? There actually was a pike in the pond at one point, but it died of boredom. Oh, how unfortunate I am!’

  Reflecting on death, the young pessimist buried himself in slime and wrote his diary…

  One day in the late afternoon Sonya and her aunt were sitting on the edge of the pond fishing. The carp swam amongst the floats and could not tear his eyes away from the girl he loved. Suddenly an idea struck his brain like lightning.

  ‘I will die by her hand!’ he thought, h
is fins sparkling happily. ‘What a wonderful sweet death it will be!’

  So he swam up to Sonya’s hook and took it in his mouth.

  ‘Sonya, you’ve got a bite!’ her aunt squealed. ‘You’ve got a bite, darling!’

  ‘Oh! Oh!’

  Sonya jumped up and pulled with all her might. Something gold glittered in the air and plopped into the water, creating circles.

  ‘It got away!’ both exclaimed at once.

  They looked at the hook and saw a fish’s lip on it.

  ‘Oh darling,’ the aunt said. ‘You shouldn’t have tugged so hard. Now the poor little fish has been left without a lip…’

  My hero was stunned when he broke away from the hook, and for a long time could not work out what had happened; then when he realized, he groaned:

  ‘I’ve got to live again! Again! How you mock me, fate!’

  When he noticed that he was missing his lower jaw, the carp went pale and gave a wild laugh… He went mad.

  I fear my wanting to occupy the attention of serious readers with the fate of such an insignificant and uninteresting creature as a carp might seem strange. But actually, what is strange about it? Ladies in literary journals describe gudgeons and snails, which no one wants to read about. I’m just copying them. And maybe I am a lady myself and am just hiding behind a male pseudonym.

  So the carp went mad. The unfortunate creature is still alive to this day. Carp generally like to be fried with sour cream, but my hero is now keen on any kind of death. Sonya Mamochkina married the owner of a chemist’s shop, and her aunt went to live with her married sister in Lipetsk. * There is nothing strange about that, because the married sister has six children and they all love their aunt.

  But there is more. At the Krandel and Sons foundry the director is an engineer called Krysin. He has a nephew called Ivan who, as everyone knows, writes poems and publishes them in all the journals and newspapers. At noon, one sultry day, the young poet was walking past the pond and decided to go for a dip. So he got undressed and slipped into the water. The mad carp took him for Sonya Mamochkina, swam up to him, and kissed him tenderly on his back. That kiss had fatal consequences: the carp infected the poet with pessimism. The poet got out of the water not suspecting anything untoward, and set off home, laughing wildly. In a few days he went to Petersburg; after visiting various editorial offices, he infected all the poets there with pessimism too, and from that time onwards all our poets have been writing dark and gloomy poems.

  THE BLACK MONK

  I

  Andrey Vasiliyevich Kovrin, master of arts, was exhausted and on the edge of a nervous breakdown. He did not go for treatment, but over a bottle of wine managed to have an informal chat with a doctor friend, who advised him to spend the spring and the summer in the country. As it happened he had just received a long letter from Tanya Pesotskaya, who wanted him to go and stay at Borisovka. So he decided that he ought indeed to go.

  At first—this was in April—he went to Kovrinka, his own estate, and spent three weeks in solitude there. Then, when the roads became passable, he set off by carriage to stay with his former guardian and tutor Pesotsky, a horticulturist renowned throughout Russia. It was only about forty miles from Kovrinka to Borisovka, where the Pesotskys lived, and it was a real pleasure to travel on soft spring roads in a quiet sprung carriage.

  Pesotsky’s house was enormous, with columns and lions with stucco mouldings, and liveried servants at the front door. The old park, sombre and austere, was laid out in the English manner * and stretched over half a mile from the house to the river, where it ended abruptly in a steep clay bank, on which grew pine trees with bare roots that looked like furry paws. The water below glinted unsociably, there were sandpipers flying about, squeaking mournfully, and somehow the atmosphere down there always made you feel like sitting down and writing a sad ballad. Near to the house, however, in the courtyard and in the orchards, which along with the nurseries occupied about eighty acres, it was always bright and cheerful, even in bad weather. Kovrin had never seen such amazing roses, lilies, and camellias as the ones Pesotsky had, or such tulips in every imaginable colour, from snow white to jet black; in fact he had never seen such an incredible profusion of flowers anywhere else. Spring had only just begun and the most opulent blooms were still hiding away in hothouses, but what was blossoming along the paths and in the flower-beds was enough to make you feel that you were in a kingdom of delicate colours as you wandered about the garden, especially in the early morning when dewdrops sparkled on every petal.

  The decorative part of the garden, which Pesotsky himself dismissed contemptuously as unimportant, used to have a magical effect on Kovrin when he was a child. There was no end to the whimsy, refined disfigurement, and mockery of nature to be found here! There were espaliered fruit trees, such as a pear tree in the form of a pyramidal poplar, there were spherical oaks and lime trees, an apple tree shaped like an umbrella, as well as trees in the form of arches, monograms, candelabra, and even a plum tree shaped into the number 1862, which was the year that Pesotsky took up horticulture. Then there were beautiful slim saplings with trunks as strong and as straight as palm trees, and it was only when you examined them closely that you could see they were actually gooseberries or blackcurrants. But the most cheerful aspect of the garden, and what made it seem so lively, was the constant activity. From early morning until dusk there were people with wheelbarrows, hoes, and watering-cans bustling about like ants around the trees and bushes, and in the paths and flower-beds…

  Kovrin arrived at the Pesotskys’ house in the evening, after nine. He found Tanya and her father Yegor Semyonich in a state of great agitation. The clear starry sky and the thermometer forecast frost the following morning, but Ivan Karlovich the gardener had gone into town and there was no one else they could rely on. At supper all they could talk about was the morning frost, and it was decided that Tanya would stay up; at one o’clock she would go into the garden to check that everything was all right, and Yegor Semyonich would get up at three or even earlier. Kovrin sat with Tanya all evening and then set off with her after midnight into the garden. It was cold. In the courtyard there was already a strong smell of burning. In the main orchard, the commercial orchard as it was called, which brought Yegor Semyonich several thousands each year in pure profit, a thick, black, acrid smoke had spread out along the ground and enveloped the trees, thus saving all those thousands from the frost. These trees were arranged like a draughts board, in regular straight rows like soldiers on parade, and this strict, pedantic regularity and the fact that all the trees were the same height and had identical foliage and trunks, made them monotonous and even boring to look at. Kovrin and Tanya walked along the rows, where there were bonfires of manure, straw, and bits of rubbish smouldering, and occasionally they met gardeners wandering about in the smoke like shadows. Only the cherry trees, plum trees, and a few sorts of apple tree were in blossom, but the whole orchard was drowning in smoke and Kovrin could only breathe properly near the nursery beds.

  ‘The smoke here used to make me sneeze when I was a child,’ said Kovrin, shrugging his shoulders. ‘And I still do not understand how the smoke stops the frost.’

  ‘When there aren’t any clouds, the smoke takes their place…,’ Tanya answered.

  ‘And why do you need clouds?’

  ‘There isn’t any frost when the weather is overcast and cloudy.’

  ‘I see!’

  He laughed and took her by the hand. He was moved by her wide, very serious, cold face, by her thin black eyebrows, by the raised collar of her coat which prevented her from moving her head freely, and by her lean and slender frame, clad in a dress which she had hitched up to stop it getting wet with dew.

  ‘Goodness, she is so grown up already!’ he said. ‘When I left here the last time, five years ago, you were still a child. You were so scraggy, with your long legs, your plain hairstyle, and your short dresses, and I used to tease you about looking like a heron… Just look what time does
!’

  ‘Yes, it’s been five years,’ said Tanya with a sigh. ‘A lot of water has flowed under the bridge since then.’ She started talking animatedly, looking straight at him. ‘Tell me Andryusha, honestly, do you feel a bit estranged from us now? I’m sorry, that is a stupid question. You are a man, you have an interesting life to lead, you are very eminent… You are bound to feel estranged. But despite all that, I would like to feel that you saw us as family, Andryusha. I think we have a right to that.’

  ‘I do see you as family, Tanya.’

  ‘Honestly?’

  ‘Yes, honestly.’

  ‘You were surprised today to see that we had so many photographs of you. But you must know how much my father adores you. Sometimes I think that he loves you more than me. He is so proud of you. You are a scholar, you are an exceptional person, you have had a brilliant career, and he is convinced that you have become what you are because he brought you up. I don’t argue with him. Let him think that.’

  Dawn was already breaking, and this was especially noticeable in the way the clouds of smoke and the tops of the trees were becoming more clearly outlined in the air. There were nightingales singing, and you could hear the croaks of quails coming from across the fields.

  ‘Anyway, it’s time for some sleep,’ Tanya said. ‘And it’s cold too.’ She took his arm. ‘Thank you for coming, Andryusha. Our friends are dull, and there aren’t very many of them anyway. All we have is gardening, gardening, and gardening–and nothing else. Standard, half-standard,’ she laughed; ‘pippins, rennets, winter apples, grafting, germination… Our whole lives have gone into gardening, and all I dream about are apple and pear trees. It’s all wonderful and useful, I know, but you can’t help wanting something else, some variety. I remember when you used to come here for the holidays, or just to visit, and the house always became brighter and more airy, as if the dust covers had been taken off the chandeliers and the furniture. I was a girl then, but I still could notice the difference.’