Short Fiction, Aleksandr Kuprin [the speed reading book txt] 📗

The garden paths are covered with light, white petals and, when the wind blows, the trees seem to be snowing in slowly falling, heavy flakes. These light snowflakes fly into my room, cover the writing-table, fall on my dress, my hair, and I can’t⁠—besides, I have no wish to⁠—rid myself of these memories which agitate me and make my head turn like some old aromatic wine.

It was last spring, the third or fourth day after your arrival at the sanatorium. The morning was just as quiet, cool, and gleaming. We were sitting on the south verandah, I in the rocking-chair covered with a pale blue sailcloth (do you remember that armchair?) and you on the balustrade, leaning against the corner post and holding it with one hand. My God, even now, after writing these lines, I stopped, closed my eyes for a few seconds, with my hand over them. And again, in front of me with extraordinary vividness, came to me your face of those days⁠—thin, pale, with fine, distinguished features, a coil of dark hair hanging carelessly over the white forehead and with those deep, sad eyes. I can visualise even that pensive and absentminded smile which used just to touch your lips when you said, looking dreamily at the falling petals of the white flowers, “The apple trees are shedding their blossom and the spring is only at its very start. Why does this swift, expansive bloom of the southern spring always awake in me such a maladive feeling of distress and unfulfilment? No later than yesterday, it seems, I was watching with emotion the first swelling buds, and today the flowers are already scattering and you know that tomorrow will come the cold autumn. Isn’t it like our own lives? In youth, you live only on hope; you think that now, at once, something great, absorbing, will seize hold of you, and then suddenly you seem to wake up and you see that nothing is left but memories and regret for the past, and you yourself are unable to tell at what precise period your real life swept by⁠—the full, consciously beautiful life.”

You see how well I remember your words! Everything associated with you is imprinted on my soul in bright relief, and I treasure it, admire and delight in it, as a miser does in his gold. I confess even that I have come here exclusively to see once more, even from the window, a morsel of our sea and our sky, to smell the fine aroma of the apple trees in flower, to hear in the evening the dry chatter of the crickets and⁠—to live endlessly over again in imagination those naive, pale memories at whose faintness a healthy person would laugh aloud. Ah, those healthy people⁠—with their rough appetite for life, their depths of strong sensation, permitted them by their strong bodies and their indifferent prodigality of soul⁠—they cannot even imagine those untranslatably delicate, inexplicably complex shades of moods through which we pass, we who are condemned almost from our birth to the monotonous vegetation of the hospital, the health resort and the sanatorium.

Here everything is as it used to be. Only you are not here, my dear friend and teacher. Of course, you can guess that through the newspapers I have heard of your recovery and that you are back again in your University chair. Our dear doctor, as fond of life as ever, has confirmed this news, his face glowing with pleasure. Doubtless he attributes your cure to his system of hot baths and his theories of diet. As you know, I don’t believe in either treatment, but all the same, I was ready to kiss this kindly and naive egoist for his news of your health.

He, on the contrary, is not at all pleased with me. I saw it in the way he shook his head, wrinkling his lips and breathing hard through his nose with that preoccupied seriousness of his, while he was listening to my chest and tapping it. Finally, he advised me to go somewhere in the real south, to Mentone or even Cairo, advised me with an awkward and jocular prudence which was a poor mask for the anxiety that kept peeping out from his eyes. Visibly, he is afraid of the bad impression that my death will create among his patients, and he wants to save them this unpleasantness. I shall be very sorry to prejudice, involuntarily, the good reputation of his establishment, but, all the same, I do consider myself entitled to the luxury of dying in this particular place, sanctified by the poignant charm of early autumn.

All the more, because this will happen much sooner than he expects; perhaps even before the last white petals of my apple tree have fled. I will confess to you, as a secret, that already I cannot go beyond the verandah, and even that is very difficult, though I still have the courage to answer the doctor’s anxious, interrogative looks with an insouciant smile. But don’t think that I am complaining to you in the selfish hope of arousing compassion for myself. No, I merely want to avail myself of the right, that a dying human being has, to discuss what healthy people are silent about from conventional shyness. Besides, I want to tell you that death does not frighten me and that it is to you, my dear friend, and only to you, that I owe this philosophic quietude. I understand now perfectly your words: “Death is the simplest and most normal of all the phenomena of life. Man comes into this world and lives exclusively through chance, but he dies only through inevitable law.” This beautiful aphorism has become to me now particularly clear.

Yes, you have taught me a great deal. Without you, I should never have reached those slow, delicate delights, produced by a book one has just read, a deep and beautiful thought from a creative mind,