Short Fiction, Fyodor Sologub [most popular novels of all time .txt] 📗

“O Lord, rest the soul.⁠ ⁠…”

They sit at luncheon long, but they talk more industriously than they eat. They glance nervously toward the gate. It seems a terrible thing to have to leave the table and to go somewhere while Borya is not yet with them.

Toward the end of luncheon the post arrives. Grisha, a fourteen-year-old youngster, goes for it daily to the station on horseback. Raising clouds of dust he jumps off briskly at the gate. Leaving his horse he enters the garden carrying a black leather bag, and smiles broadly at something or other. Ascending the long steps of the terrace he announces loudly and joyously:

“I’ve fetched the post!”

He is cheery, sunburnt, perspiring. He smells of the sun, of the soil, of dust and tar. His hands and feet are as large as a man’s. His lips are soft and pouting, like those of a sweet-tempered foal. At the opening of his shirt, cut on the slant, buttons are missing, exposing a strip of his sunburnt chest and a piece of grey string.

Sofia Alexandrovna rises abruptly from her place. She takes the bag from Grisha, and throws it quickly on the table. A pile of stamped wrappers comes pouring upon the white cloth. The three women bend over the table and rummage for letters. But letters come only rarely.

Knitting her brows Natasha looks at the smiling youngster and asks:

“No letters, Grisha?”

Grisha, shuffling his feet, brick-red from the sun, smiles and answers, as always, in the same words:

“The letters are being written, barishnya.”

Sofia Alexandrovna says impatiently:

“You may go, Grisha.”

Grisha goes. The women open their newspapers.

Sofia Alexandrovna takes up the Rech and scans it rapidly, occasionally mentioning something that has attracted her notice.

Natasha is looking over Slovo. She reads silently, slowly, and attentively.

Elena Kirillovna has the Russkiya Vedomosti. She tears the wrapper open slowly and spreads the entire sheet on the table. She reads on, quickly running her eyes over the lines.

Groaning, the old nurse slowly ascends the steps. Sofia Alexandrovna pauses from her reading a moment and looks with fear at the old woman. Natasha gives a nervous start and turns away. Elena Kirillovna reads on calmly, without looking at the nurse.

The nurse sighs, sits down on the bench at the entrance, and asks in a monotone the one and the same question that she asks each day:

“And how many folk are there in this morning’s paper that’s been ordered to die? And how many are there that’s been hanged?”

Sofia Alexandrovna drops the paper, and suddenly rising, very pale, looks upon the old woman. She is quivering from head to foot. Elena Kirillovna, folding the paper, pushes it aside and looks straight before her with arrested eyes. Natasha rises; she turns her face, which has suddenly grown pale, toward the old woman, and utters in a kind of wooden voice that does not seem like her own:

“In Ekaterinoslav⁠—seven; in Moscow⁠—one.”

Or other towns, and other figures⁠—such as fresh newspaper lists bring each day.

The nurse rises and crosses herself piously. She mutters:

“O Lord, rest the souls of Thy servants! And give them eternal life!”

Then Sofia Alexandrovna cries out in despair:

“Oh Borya, Borya, my Borya!”

Her face is as pale as though there were not a single drop of blood left under her dull, elastic skin.

Wringing her hands with a convulsive movement, she looks with terror at Elena Kirillovna and at her daughter. Elena Kirillovna turns aside, and, looking at the old nurse, shakes her head reproachfully, while in her eyes, like drops of early evening dew, appear a few scant tears.

Natasha, looking determinedly at her mother, says with pale, quivering lips:

“Mamma, calm yourself.”

Suddenly her voice becomes cold and wooden again as though some evil stranger compelled her each day to utter her words slowly and deliberately.

“You yourself know, mamma, that Borya was hanged a full year ago!”

She looks at her mother with the motionless, pathetic gaze of her very dark eyes, and repeats:

“You yourself know this, mamma!”

Sofia Alexandrovna’s eyes are widely dilated; dull, there is terror in them, and the deep pupils burn with an impercipient lustre in their dark depths. She repeats almost soundlessly, looking straight into Natasha’s eyes:

“Hanged!”

She resumes her place, looks out of her sad eyes at the white Aphrodite and the red roses at the goddess’s feet, and is silent. Her face is white and rigid, her lips are red and tightly set; there is a suggestion of latent madness in the still lustre of her eyes.

Before the image of eternal beauty, before the fragrance of the short-lived, exultant roses, she is hardening as it were into an image of the eternal grief of a disconsolate mother.

Elena Kirillovna quietly descends the narrow side staircase into the garden. She sits down on a bench somewhat away from the house, looks upon the green bedecked pond and weeps.

Natasha goes into her room in the mezzanine. She opens a book and tries to read. But she finds it impossible. She puts the book aside and looks out of the window, and her eyes are dimmed.

Higher and higher above the old house rises the pitiless, bright Dragon. His joyous laughter rings in the merry heights, encloses, as in a flaming circle, the depressing silence of the house. The well-directed rays shoot out like sharp-plumed arrows, and the air is tremulous with eternal, inexhaustible anger. No one is being awaited. No one will come. Borya has died. The relentless wheel of time knows no turning back.

So the day is passing⁠—clearly and brightly. The dazzling white light says there is nothing to hope for.

Natasha sits in her room before an open window. A book is lying on the windowsill. She has no desire to read.

Every line in the book reminds her of him, of unfinished conversations, of heated discussions, of what had been, of what is no more.

The memories become brighter and brighter, and reach at last