The Beauties: Essential Stories Read online

  Mother’s words threw Spiridon into fevers and sweats, because he was sure he wouldn’t get it right. He charged one rouble twenty kopeks for making my suit, and two roubles for Pobedimsky’s, while we supplied the cloth, linings and buttons. That wasn’t really expensive, especially as Novostroyevka was some seven miles from us, and the tailor came four times for fittings. At those fittings, when we squeezed ourselves into the narrow trousers and jackets all covered with basting threads, Mother would always frown disapprovingly and say in astonishment:

  “God knows what the fashions are coming to nowadays! I’m ashamed even to look at this. If my brother didn’t live in the capital, I’d never dream of getting you fashionable clothes!”

  Spiridon was pleased that fashion was getting the blame rather than himself, and shrugged his shoulders as if to say “Nothing to be done – that’s the spirit of the time!”

  The excitement with which we awaited our guest’s arrival can only be compared to the feeling of suspense at a spiritualist séance, as the medium awaits the imminent appearance of a spirit. Mother suffered migraines and kept bursting into tears. I lost my appetite, slept badly and neglected my lessons. Even in my dreams, I was constantly longing to see a general as soon as I could – that is, a man wearing epaulettes, an embroidered collar riding up as high as his ears, and carrying a drawn sabre in his hand – just like the man in the picture over the divan in our drawing room, who glared with his terrifying dark eyes at anyone bold enough to look at him. Only Pobedimsky still felt at ease. He was neither terrified nor delighted; but occasionally, when he listened to my mother telling the story of the Gundasov family, he would say:

  “Yes, it’ll be nice to have someone fresh to talk to.”

  My tutor was regarded by the people on our estate as someone quite out of the ordinary. He was a young man of twenty or so with a pimply complexion, shaggy hair, a low brow and an unusually long nose – so long that when he wanted to take a close look at something, he was obliged to cock his head to one side like a bird. As far as we were concerned, there was no one as clever, as well-educated or as stylish as him in the whole province. He had completed all six classes of high school, and then enrolled at the veterinary school, from which he was expelled before he had been there six months. He kept the reason for his expulsion very dark, which allowed anyone that way inclined to see him as a man who had suffered, and to some extent as a man of mystery. He spoke little, and only about learned subjects, ate meat during the fasts, and always viewed life around him with haughty disdain – though that never stopped him accepting presents such as suits of clothes from my mother, or decorating my kites with silly faces and red teeth. Mother disliked him for his “pride”, but was in awe of his intellect.

  Our guest did not keep us waiting long. In early May, two wagonloads of big trunks arrived from the station. The trunks looked so majestic that the drivers, as they unloaded them, instinctively doffed their caps.

  “I suppose those trunks must be full of uniforms and gunpowder…” I thought to myself.

  Why gunpowder? Probably the notion of a general was closely bound up in my mind with cannon and gunpowder.

  When I awoke on the morning of 10th May, my nurse whispered to me that “His Excellency your uncle” had arrived. I dressed quickly, washed after a fashion, skipped my prayers and rushed downstairs. In the hallway I bumped into a tall, corpulent gentleman with modish side whiskers and a dandified overcoat. Overcome with holy terror, I approached him and, remembering the ceremonial drawn up by my mother, scraped back one foot, bowed low and made to kiss his hand; but the gentleman withdrew his hand and explained that he was not my uncle but merely Piotr, my uncle’s valet. The sight of this Piotr, dressed far more splendidly than Pobedimsky or me, filled me with profound astonishment, which to tell the truth has remained with me to this day. Is it possible that such solid, dignified men, with intelligent, stern faces, can just be lackeys? What does it all mean?

  Piotr told me that my mother and uncle were in the garden. I rushed out to find them.

  Nature, knowing nothing of the history of the Gundasovs or of my uncle’s rank, was feeling far more free and relaxed than I was. The garden was a scene of such commotion as one only ever sees at a fair. Countless starlings skimmed through the air and hopped around the paths, noisily twittering as they hunted for May beetles. Flocks of sparrows filled the lilac bushes, which thrust their tender fragrant blossoms straight into your face. At every turn, the air was full of the song of golden orioles and the shrill cries of hoopoes and red-footed falcons. At any other time I would have been hunting for dragonflies or chucking stones at the raven perched on a little hummock under an aspen tree, turning his blunt beak this way and that. But now I was in no mood for mischief – my heart was pounding, I felt cold in the pit of my stomach; I was preparing to meet a man with epaulettes, a drawn sabre, and terrifying eyes!

  Imagine my disappointment! Strolling about the garden by Mother’s side was a skinny little dandy wearing white silk trousers and a white cap. He had his hands in his pockets, his head thrown back, and he kept running ahead of Mother; he seemed to be quite a young man. There was so much movement and life in his whole body that I could see no signs of treacherous old age in him until I approached him from behind and looked up at the headband of his cap, beneath which some close-cropped silver hairs could be seen. Instead of the solid, stiff movements of a general, I saw an almost schoolboyish fidgetiness; instead of a stiff collar pushing up at his ears, an ordinary pale-blue neckcloth. Mother and uncle were strolling along a path and chatting. I came quietly up behind them and waited for one of them to look round.

  “What a delightful place you have here, Klavdia!” said my uncle. “How sweet and charming it is! If I’d known you had such a lovely home, nothing would have induced me to spend all those years going abroad.”

  My uncle quickly bent forward and sniffed at a tulip. Everything he saw delighted him and roused his curiosity, as if he had never before in his life seen a garden or a sunny day. This strange man seemed to bounce around on springs, and never stopped chattering, never allowing my mother to get a word in. All of a sudden Pobedimsky appeared from behind an elder tree at a bend in the path. This was so unexpected that my uncle gave a start and took a step backwards. On this occasion my tutor was wearing his best long-sleeved cape, which (particularly from behind) made him look very like a windmill. He had a solemn and majestic air. Pressing his hat to his breast in the Spanish style, he took a step towards my uncle and bowed the way marquesses bow in melodramas – forwards and a little sideways.

  “I have the honour to present myself to your Excellency,” he announced in a loud voice. “Tutor and instructor to your nephew, formerly enrolled at the Veterinary Institute, nobleman Pobedimsky!”

  Such courtesy on the part of my tutor greatly pleased Mother. She smiled, and froze in the pleasant expectation that he would make some other clever remark; but my tutor, expecting that his majestic greeting would bring a majestic response, in other words that he would receive a lordly “Hm!” from the general and be offered a pair of fingers to shake, was deeply embarrassed and cowed to receive from my uncle a friendly laugh and a firm handshake. He muttered a few more incoherent words, coughed and stood aside.

  “Well, isn’t that nice now?” laughed my uncle. “Just look: he puts on a cloak and thinks he’s ever so clever! I like that, upon my soul!… What youthful aplomb, what life, in that silly cloak! And who’s this lad?” he asked, turning and suddenly catching sight of me.

  “This is my Andryushenka,” said my mother, presenting me with a blush. “My pride and joy…”

  I scraped my foot over the sand and performed a deep bow.

  “A fine lad… fine lad…” muttered my uncle, withdrawing his hand which I was attempting to kiss, and stroking my head. “So you’re called Andryusha, eh? Fine, fine… Mm-yes… upon my soul… At school, are you?”

  Mother began to describe my brilliance at school and my excellent behaviour
, fibbing and exaggerating as all mothers do, while I walked beside my uncle and, in accordance with prescribed ceremonial, never stopped making low bows. When Mother started dropping hints about what a good idea it would be for a boy with my remarkable talents to get into the cadet corps on a government grant, and when I, in accordance with prescribed ceremonial, was supposed to burst into tears and beg my uncle for his patronage, my uncle stopped dead and flung out his arms in astonishment.

  “Goodness gracious! What have we here?” he demanded.

  Advancing straight towards us along the path came Tatyana Ivanovna, the wife of our bailiff Fyodor Petrovich. She was carrying a starched white petticoat and a long ironing board. As she passed us she glanced timidly through lowered eyelashes at our guest, and blushed crimson.

  “Just one thing after another…” muttered my uncle through his teeth, tenderly watching her retreating figure. “At your home, my sister, every step brings a new surprise…”

  “She’s our beauty,” said Mother. “We sent for her all the way from town, seventy miles off, to be Fyodor’s bride.”

  Not everyone would have called Tatyana Ivanovna a beauty. She was a plump little thing of twenty or so, quite graceful, with an attractive rosy face and dark eyebrows, but her face and her whole person were devoid of any striking feature; there was not a single bold line to catch the eye, as if nature in creating her had run out of inspiration and resolve. Tatyana Ivanovna was timid, shy and well-mannered, walked smoothly and quietly, spoke little, rarely laughed, and her whole life was as even and flat as her face and her smooth, slicked-down hair. My uncle screwed up his eyes and smiled as he gazed after her. Mother looked sharply at his smiling face and turned serious.

  “And so you never married, brother!” she sighed.

  “No, I never married.”

  “Why was that?” Mother asked gently.

  “What can I say? That’s how my life turned out. When I was young I was too hard-working, I had no time for living, and later when I wanted to live – I looked around and saw fifty years behind my back. I was too late! But… it’s depressing, talking about all that.”

  My mother and uncle both sighed in unison and walked on, while I dropped back and ran off to find my tutor and share my impressions with him. Pobedimsky was standing in the middle of the courtyard, solemnly gazing up at the sky.

  “He’s obviously a cultured man,” he said, twisting his head to look at me. “I hope we get on.”

  An hour later Mother came to find us.

  “My darlings, I have a terrible problem!” she panted. “My brother has arrived with his valet, and that valet, God help him, isn’t the sort of person you could put up in the kitchen or the hallway – he’s absolutely got to have a room of his own. I can’t think what to do with him! Unless – couldn’t you, my children, perhaps move into Fyodor’s hut for a time? And then we’d give the valet your room, eh?”

  We willingly agreed, because we’d have far more freedom living in the hut than under Mother’s eye in the house.

  “It’s an absolute disaster!” Mother went on. “My brother says he won’t dine at midday but after six in the evening, the way they do in Petersburg. I’m simply at my wits’ end! By seven at night the whole dinner will be spoilt in the oven. Honestly, men don’t understand the first thing about running a household, for all they’re so clever. There’s no help for it, we’ll have to cook two dinners! You, my children, can carry on eating your dinner at midday, but your poor old mother will have to hold out till seven for my dear brother’s sake.”

  Mother heaved a deep sigh, told me to try and please my uncle whom God had sent as a stroke of luck for me, and ran off to the kitchen. That same day Pobedimsky and I moved over to the hut. We were put up in a through room between the hallway and the bailiff’s bedroom.

  Despite my uncle’s arrival and our move, our lives unexpectedly carried on much as before – dull and monotonous. We were excused lessons “on account of the guest”. Pobedimsky, who never read or occupied himself in any way, generally sat on his bed tracing patterns in the air with his long nose, thinking about something or other. From time to time he would get up, try on his new suit, and then sit down again to think in silence. Only one thing bothered him – the flies, which he mercilessly slapped with the palms of his hands. After dinner he would generally “have a rest”, and his snores upset everyone on the estate. I would be running about the gardens from morning till night, or sitting in the hut building kites. During the first two or three weeks we didn’t see much of my uncle. He would spend whole days on end sitting and working in his room, despite the flies and the heat. His extraordinary capacity for sitting glued to his table seemed to us a sort of inexplicable conjuring trick. We idle folk knew nothing of regular work, and his assiduity struck us as nothing short of a miracle. He woke at nine every day, sat down at his table and never rose from it till dinnertime; after dinner he would go back to his work, and carry on with it till late at night. When I peeped through his keyhole, I only ever saw one and the same thing: my uncle sitting at his table, working. The work consisted in writing with one hand while the other leafed through a book; and very oddly, his whole body was in constant movement, his leg swinging like a pendulum, while he whistled a tune and nodded his head in time with it. He wore a very absent-minded and light-hearted expression, as if he wasn’t working but playing noughts and crosses. I always saw him wearing his short, dandified jacket and a jauntily tied cravat, and he always smelt – even through the keyhole – of some delicate feminine perfume. The only thing that brought him out of his room was his dinner; but he didn’t eat much.

  “I can’t understand my brother!” Mother complained. “Every day we kill a turkey and some pigeons just for him, and I make him a fruit compote with my own hands, and then he just swallows a bowl of soup and eats a little finger of meat, and leaves the table. And if I beg him to eat some more, he sits down again and drinks some milk. What good is there in milk, I ask you? Nothing but dishwater! You’d die of a diet like that!… If I start trying to persuade him, all he does is laugh and make fun of me… No, he doesn’t care for our food, that dear brother of mine!”

  Our evenings were much more fun than the days. When the sun was setting and long shadows stretched across the courtyard, we – that is, Tatyana Ivanovna, Pobedimsky and I – would already be sitting on the steps outside the hut. We wouldn’t talk until it got quite dark. What were we supposed to talk about, anyway, when we’d already said all there was to be said? There was only one bit of news, my uncle’s arrival, but even that topic was soon exhausted. My tutor never took his eyes off Tatyana Ivanovna’s face, and heaved deep sighs… At the time I didn’t understand his sighs, nor look for an explanation, but now I find they explain a great deal.

  When the shadows on the ground merged into one continuous shadow, Fyodor the bailiff would return from hunting or from the fields. This Fyodor struck me as a wild and even frightening man. He was the son of a Russianized gypsy from Izyum, swarthy, with big dark eyes, curly hair and a ragged beard; our local peasants at Kochuyevka only ever called him “that devil”. There was a lot of the gypsy about him, quite apart from his appearance. He couldn’t stand staying at home, and would disappear for days on end hunting or out in the fields. He was gloomy, ill-humoured, taciturn, afraid of no one, and recognized no one’s authority over him. He was rude to my mother, spoke familiarly to me and despised Pobedimsky’s learning. But Mother liked him because, despite his gypsy nature, he was scrupulously honest and hard-working. He loved his Tatyana Ivanovna passionately, like a gypsy, but this love of his expressed itself as moroseness and suffering. He never caressed his wife in front of us, but just goggled crossly at her and twisted his mouth in a grimace.

  When he came in from the fields he would bang his gun down angrily on the floor of the hut, join us outside, and sit down next to his wife. After resting a little he would ask his wife some questions about household matters, and then lapse into silence again.

  �
��Let’s have a song,” I would suggest.

  My tutor would tune his guitar and strike up “In the Green Valley” in the gruff bass voice of a lay clerk. We would all join in the singing, the tutor in his bass, Fyodor in an almost inaudible light tenor, and I singing a descant in unison with Tatyana Ivanovna.

  When all the sky was covered with stars, and the frogs had fallen silent, our supper would be brought over from the kitchen. We would go into the hut to eat. The tutor and the gypsy ate voraciously, making cracking noises which might have been bones crunching or their jaws snapping; Tatyana Ivanovna and I had our work cut out to secure our own shares. After supper the hut was plunged in deep sleep.

  One day in late May we were sitting outside the hut waiting for our supper. Suddenly a shadow passed, and Gundasov appeared before us as if he had risen up through the ground. He gazed at us for a long time, then held up his hands and burst into merry laughter.

  “Idyllic!” he said. “Singing and dreaming in the moon-light! How lovely, upon my soul! Can I sit and dream with you?”

  We exchanged looks but said nothing. My uncle sat down on the bottom step, yawned and looked up at the sky. There was a silence. Pobedimsky, who had long been hoping to have a conversation with a fresh face, was pleased with his luck and was the first to break the silence. He only had one topic for intellectual conversations – epizootics. It sometimes happens that when you find yourself in a crowd of thousands of people, for some reason only one physiognomy among those thousands carves itself a permanent place in your memory. It was the same with Pobedimsky: out of everything he had been told in his half year at the veterinary institute, there was only one fact he had committed to memory:

  “Epizootics cause enormous damage to our nation’s agriculture. In the battle against them, society must act hand in hand with the government.”

  Before saying this to Gundasov, my tutor coughed three times and anxiously wrapped his cape tightly about him, repeating the gesture several times over. On being told about epizootics, my uncle stared hard at the tutor and snorted with laughter.