And Time Was No More, page 8
Why had I got into such a state? What was it had frightened me?
“It’s Fedka, the driver. He’s took a turn, but he’ll soon be reight. It’s t’ fallin sickness, in’t it.”
The doctor had even given the driver his sheepskin blanket—his pride and joy.
I remember the outlandish pan and the iron fork. I feel racked by shame. If only out of politeness, I should have at least tried those eggs. I had behaved badly.
The old man comes back, with fresh horses.
As I leave, I quietly stroke the blanket, as if apologizing for the disgust I’d felt earlier.
Later that day, in a grand drawing room full of furniture upholstered in red corduroy, I had to listen to Alexey Nikolaevich. Tall, stupid, utterly alien to me and idiotically jealous at my having travelled with Dr Oglanov—he made quite a scene. And when I told this stupid and evil man that I didn’t love him and had no intention of marrying him, his eyes bulged.
“I don’t believe it!” he said—and he did indeed sound incredulous.
I never saw Dr Oglanov again. But now and then, if I happen to recall our encounter, I find myself wondering… Did that sly Shapeshifter take on the guise of a perfect gentleman, someone uniquely kind and affectionate, just so that he could ruin my chance of happiness with a splendid husband by the name of Alexey Nikolaevich?
1931
translated by robert and elizabeth chandler with siân valvis
Notes
1 A verst is approximately the same length as a kilometre.
2 An organ of local government. Established in 1864, three years after the emancipation of the serfs, these democratically elected councils were central to the liberal movement during the last decades of tsarist rule. They were responsible for building schools, hospitals, roads, etc.
Solovki
for Ivan Bunin
The seagulls from the shore accompanied the steamer for a long time. After a while they grew tired and began coming down more often onto the water, barely grazing it with their breasts, spinning round as if on the point of a screw—and then wearily gliding off again, leading first with one wing and then with the other, as if taking long strides.
From the stern, pilgrims threw them bread. Many of them came from far inland. It was their first encounter with the sea and they were astonished by the gulls.
“What strong birds!”
“What great big birds!”
“But people say you can’t eat them.”
When the boat reached open sea and the shore it had left behind was no more than a low, narrow strip of pale blue, the gulls dispersed. Three last greedy birds took a few more strides, begged again for bread, veered off somewhere to the left, called to one another and disappeared.
The sea was now empty and free. In the sky shone two diffuse bands of crimson: one not yet extinguished, still red-hot from the departed sun, and one now catching fire from the rising sun. The steamer, lit by the silvery-pink light that cast no shadow, was cutting aslant through the waves; from the deck it appeared to be sailing sideways, skimming weightlessly over the water. And high in the air, fastened to the mast, swaying gently against the pink clouds, a golden cross marked out the boat’s path.
The Archangel Michael, a holy boat, was taking pilgrims from Arkhangelsk to the Solovetsky Monastery.1
There were a lot of passengers. They sat about on benches, on steps and on the deck itself, conversing quietly and respectfully, and looking with awe at the golden cross in the sky, at the boat’s steward—a monk in a faded, now greenish cassock—and at the gulls. They sighed, yawned and made the sign of the cross over their open mouths.
Up on the bridge a monk in a sheepskin coat and a black skullcap kept coughing hoarsely. Now and then he would call out to the helmsman—his commands as abrupt as the gulls’ cries—and then start coughing again.
Waves were beating rhythmically against the hull; the crimson glow had faded; the birds had flown away. The drama of setting sail was now over and the passengers began to settle down for the night.
Peasant women hitched up the calico skirts they had starched for the holiday and this unusual journey, and then lay down on the floor, tucking in their legs and their heavy, awkward feet. The menfolk were talking quietly in separate groups.
Red-haired, thickset Semyon Rubaev came down the ladder and joined the men. His wife remained alone, sitting on one of the steps. She didn’t move or even turn her head. She merely gave him a sideways look, full of mistrust and resentment.
Semyon listened for a while to the other men. A tall curly-haired old man from White Lake was talking about the smelt they now caught there. “We’ve a damage now. A damage. Engineers built it. They needed earth for this damage. They took earth of mine.”
“What damage? You’re not making sense.”
“For the damage… The da… For the dam.” The old man fell silent for a moment, then added, “I’m in my nineties, you know. Yes, that’s how it is now.”
Semyon didn’t care in the least about the old man’s age, nor about the smelt in the lake. He wanted to talk about his own concerns, but he didn’t know how to bring them into the conversation; it was hard to find the right moment. He looked around at his wife. She was sitting sideways to him, looking away. He could barely see her broad face and the pale, taut line of her mouth.
And then nothing could hold him back. “Well, we come from near Novgorod. From the Borovichy district. Penance, a church penance—that’s why I’ve brought ’er along with me.”
He stopped. But since no one asked him anything, he eventually began again: “Penance, confession an’ penance.2 Varvara, ma wife. No light matter, I ’ad to take it to the district officer.”
Varvara got up from the step. Baring her white teeth like a vicious cat, she moved a little further away, then stood beside the rail, resting both elbows on it.
There was nowhere further to go. The pilgrims sitting on the deck were densely packed. She could hardly use their heads as stepping stones.
Now at least she could no longer hear all that Semyon was saying. The odd word, however, still reached her.
“The whole village were complainin… There weren’t one lass that Vanya Tsyganov… The officer… Ma wife Varvara…”
Varvara hunched her shoulders. She was still baring her teeth. Semyon was still talking, talking, talking:
“Varvara, aye, Varvara… ‘We just kissed,’ she said… A court sentence weren’t possible. But a penance, a church penance…”
For ten months Semyon had been telling this story, over and over. And now, like clockwork, all through this journey. On the iron road, at every station where they’d stopped, in the pilgrims’ hostel at Arkhangelsk, wherever there were ears to be filled, he had told it once more. Since the day all this began, since their neighbour Yerokhina had run back from the fields, pulled off her kerchief and wailed out that Tsyganov had wronged her—and then old Mitrofanikha had rushed out and yelled that her granddaughter Feklushka was being pestered by Tsyganov too, that Tsyganov wasn’t giving the girl a moment’s peace. Other women of all ages appeared, all white with fury, kerchiefs slipping off their heads, all cursing Tsyganov and threatening to lodge official complaints and have him driven out of the village. And then Lukina had caught sight of Varvara at her window and shouted out that Varvara had been with Tsyganov too. She’d seen them out in the rye:
“Them two, walking side by side! Arms around each other!”
And from then on, work had been forgotten. Semyon had done nothing but tell this story.
He went along as a witness for Yerokhina. He told the officer about Varvara and demanded that she be brought to trial and punished. He dragged Varvara around with him and wherever they went—on the road, in country inns and town lodgings—he had gone on telling this story. At first he had spoken gently, calling her “Varenka”, the same as ever. “So, Varenka, tell me how all this came to happen. All o’ the circumstances.”
“How wot happened? Nowt happened.”
Then he would go purple all over, his red beard seeming to fill with blood. Choking with fury, he would say, “Bitch! Snake! How dare you? How dare you speak so to yer wedded husband!”
And all day long Varvara had busied herself around the house, not exactly working, more just fussing about in one corner after another—anything to get out of earshot, anything not to hear.
As for Tsyganov, he was nowhere to be seen. He had gone off to the city to work as a cab driver. The women began to calm down. Only down by the river in the evening, as they beat the damp linen with their bats, the young girls sometimes sang a jokey song from St Petersburg:
Vanka, Vanka, wot you done wi yer conscience?
Where be yer heart of hearts?
—Wasted ’em both in the taverns
for love o’ billiards an’ cards.
Their voices sounded thin, almost mosquito-like.
As for Semyon, he went on and on questioning Varvara and repeating his story. And Varvara fell more and more silent. When the officer asked her about Yerokhina, her only reply, delivered in a tone of true Novgorod obstinacy, was, “Nowt to do wiv me.”
And so life went on. In the daytime Varvara hardly spoke. At night she kept thinking things over, reliving that day again and again. She had heard screaming women; she had seen their white-hot, vicious fury. The devil had got into them. And what a lot of them there had been. Even pockmarked Mavrushka had shouted out, as if bragging, “D’ye think he didn’t touch me? No, he touched me all right. Only I hold my tongue. But if you all speak, then I’m speakin too!”
Her pockmarks, it seems, had not counted against her. The lads had jeered, “Oh, Mavrushka, Mavrushka! And her wi t’ body of a bear!”
Yerokhina, for her part, had lamented, “Eight year, believe me, I’ve kept a hold o’ me honour—and then… Along come this fiend—an’ he snatches it from me!”
All shaking in jealous rage. All shouting, as if bragging, “Me too. Aye, me too!”
A sly fellow with the nickname “Tomcat” had smirked mischievously and said, “You lassies be in a right state. What’s eatin you, then? Eh?”
He seemed to have hit on something.
They reached Solovki as the bells were ringing for matins.
On the shore to meet them were monks and seagulls.
The monks were thin, with severe faces. The gulls were large and plump, almost as big as geese. They waddled about proprietorially, exchanging preoccupied remarks.
Unloading and disembarkation took a long time. Some of the pilgrims were still packing their knapsacks when the wife of the elderly fisherman returned from the Holy Lake, after bathing in its icy waters. She had put on a clean linen shift and was smiling beatifically, her lips purple with cold.
The hosteller, a tall monk with a neatly combed beard, was dealing with the new arrivals, arranging who should sleep where. Since there were crowds of pilgrims and little space, the Rubaevs were put in part of what had once been a room for gentlefolk. This had whitewashed walls and two windows, but it was now divided into three by partitions. One part had been given to a teacher and his wife, and the biggest part—with three beds and a sofa—to a party of four.
The head of this party was an Oriental-looking abbot. Handsome and well turned out, he had chosen, for convenience while travelling, to abandon his monastic dress for that of an ordinary priest: “People, I understand, have little love for monks, and they criticize them for everything: Why’s he smoking? Why’s he eating fish? Why’s there sugar in his tea? But how can a man observe the rules when he’s on the road? Dress as a priest—and you don’t tempt people to judge.”
Together with the abbot were a merchant, a lanky young gymnasium student—and a hypocritical old bigot of a public official. All three were family.
The remaining little cubicle, with no window, was allocated to the Rubaevs.
The pilgrims spent the rest of the day either attending church services, looking around the monastery, wandering about the forest or along the seashore, walking down the long, musty hostel corridor—with its damp and grimy, finger-marked doors, weighted to slam heavily shut—or visiting the little monastery shop and haggling over the price of icons, small cypresswood crosses and prayer-belts for the deceased.3
There was one very tall young man whom it was hard not to notice. He was smartly dressed, with a new peaked cap and patent leather boots, and he had come for healing; he suffered from spasms that repeatedly wrenched at his mouth, forcing it open. It was as if his jaw were in the grip of a vast, insuperable yawn; he would involuntarily stick his tongue out and slobber all down his chin and neck. Then the fit would come to an end and his mouth would close, his teeth snapping together like those of a dog that has caught a fly.
Accompanying him was a short little fellow who could have passed for the impresario of an exotic theatre troupe. He wore a silver chain that hung down over his round belly and he bustled about excitedly, taking evident pride in the young man’s illness and proffering explanations: “Keeps on yawning, he does. Several years now, yes, indeed. He’s the son of rich people. Make way, make way now, if you please!”
The monastery courtyard was full of gulls. They were round and placid, like household geese. They sat between gravestones and on the path leading to the church. They weren’t afraid of people and didn’t get out of your way—it was for you to walk around them. And on the back of almost every one of them was a chick—like a fluffy, spotted egg propped on two thin little twigs.
The gulls called out to one another in quick, curt barks. They always began loudly, then gradually quietened, as if losing hope. They sat crowded together about the monastery and did not fly anywhere. It was very cold. The small rectangular Holy Lake was swollen with grey-blue water. One gull went down to the lake and gazed for a long time, with a suspicious eye, at its violet ripples. Some way off, a chick was cheeping importantly, as if imparting advice. The gull stretched out one foot, touched the water, quickly withdrew the foot and twitched its head a little.
“Too cold, old girl?” asked a young monk.
Against the grey sky swayed lopsided trees; their branches, reaching towards the sun like arms stretched towards a distant dream, grew only from their southern side. The northern side, gnawed by cold breaths from the throat of the Arctic Ocean, remained naked and sickly all summer, as in winter.
Down by the harbour some young lads, with faded skullcaps over thick strands of fair, curly hair, were throwing pebbles in the water and scuffling with one another. They were like puny young bear cubs, fighting clumsily and without anger. Pomors,4 from villages along the mainland coast, they had been brought to the monastery to labour for a year or two in fulfilment of vows made by their mothers. “Aye, ’e’ll serve t’ Lord—and ’e’ll earn ’is keep too.”5
And there were solitary monks wandering along the shore. Now and again they would stop and look at the water, as if waiting for something.
One after another the grey-blue waves uncoiled, splashing against the brown rocks, filling hearts with a leaden sadness.
Along with the other pilgrims, the Rubaevs went to the church and then on into the forest. Monks in faded cassocks emerged from the little chapels. They seemed to struggle to understand even the simplest questions. If someone asked, “Which church is this?”, they would reply, “How?”, then smile affably and withdraw to gaze at the water.6
Outside the chapel of Saint Philaret, the pilgrims took it in turn to lift the long stone that had once served Philaret as a pillow. They laid it on their heads and walked three times clockwise around the chapel—a cure for headaches.7
In the furthest of the little chapels, ten versts or so from the monastery, the pilgrims were met by the very oldest elders of all. They were barely able to put one foot in front of the other, barely still breathing.
“But how, good fathers, do you walk to the church?”
“We go, good people, but once a year. On Easter Sunday, yes, to Holy Matins. That day we all meet together—from cliffs, from woods, from bogs, from t’ open fields. Every one of us goes—and they count us up. As for food, we get by. They bring us our bread.”
The hostel was no place to sit in for long. The Rubaevs’ cubicle was dark and damp. Semyon would come in, sit down on the bed and start to drone on once again:
“Mind you tell it all. As God is your witness. Each and every circumstance. Tell everything, or woe betide you!”
Varvara did not reply.
Behind the partition the merchant and the gymnasium student kept demanding more hot water for their tea. The official was sighing piously.
Behind the other partition the teacher’s wife was criticizing the ways of the monastery: “They just stand there and stare at the water. Will that save their souls? And at table they defile themselves with mustard.8 Will that save their souls?”
And then the pilgrims would all wander up and down the shore again, or along the monastery corridors.
They looked at the paintings of the Last Judgement and the Parables of Our Lord. A huge beam planted in the eye of the sinner who so clearly beheld the mote in his brother’s eye. The temptation of beauty, illustrated by a devil—with a rather appealing canine muzzle, shaggy webbed paws, a curly tail and a modest brown apron tied around his belly9—and a fragrant legend: as the brothers were praying in church, this devil had slipped unseen between them, distributing the scented pink flowers known as house lime.10 Whoever received a flower found himself unable to go on praying; tempted by the spring sun and grasses, he would steal out to freedom11—until in the end the devil was caught by the Holy Elder. And portrayals of every kind of ordeal and hardship, of sins and torments, sins and torments…
Towards evening they were called to the refectory. The women sat in a separate room.
To one side of Varvara was a woman all covered in scabs. Sitting opposite her was an old woman with a nose like a duck’s beak. Before dipping her spoon into the communal bowl, she would lick it all over with her long, flaccid, rag-like tongue. They ate salt-cod soup and drank bland monastery kvas12 with a faint taste of mint. A monk read aloud to them in a dismal monotone: “Lechery, lechery, the devil.”
