Short Fiction, Ivan Bunin [reading women .TXT] 📗

he’s waked up. He’s coughing all the time, all the time going out into the yard, banging the door.

“What you walking about for?” I ask.

“My stomach aches,” he says.

I can hear by his voice that he’s upset and grieving.

“Drink some of that mugwort and vodka that you’ll find in a bottle standing in the image shrine.”

I lay a little longer⁠—I may have dozed off a little⁠—when I felt through my slumber, that someone is stealing up over the flooring. I jumped up⁠—it was he.

“Mother, dear,” he says, “don’t be afraid of me, for the love of Christ!”

And then he went off into a flood of tears! He sat down on the bed, catching my hands, kissing them, raining tears on them⁠—and just unable to catch his breath⁠—that’s how he was crying and sobbing. I couldn’t bear it⁠—and went off on my own! It was a pity, of course, but there was no help for it⁠—all my future lot turned upon him. But then, I saw he understood all this very well himself.

“I can forgive you,” I says, “but you see yourself, now, that there’s nothing to be done about it. So you just go away as far as possible, so’s I shouldn’t even hear about you!”

“Mother, dear,” he says, “why have you ruined me, just like you ruined that poor cripple Nicanor Matveich?”

Well, I see the man ain’t in his right senses yet, so I didn’t even start to argue with him. He cried and he cried, then he got up and went away. And in the morning, I look into the room where he’d slept, but he was already gone for a long while. That meant he had gone as early as possible for shame⁠—and then he just disappeared, like a stone in the water. There was a rumour, now, that he had lived for a while in a monastery at Zadorsk; that he had then travelled to Tsaritsin⁠—and there, never fear, he must have broken his neck.⁠ ⁠… But what’s the use of talking about it⁠—it only troubles the heart! No matter how much you cook water, it will still be water.⁠ ⁠…

But as to what he’d said about Nicanor Matveich⁠—why, I think it’s even silly. It wasn’t like I had been greedy after a great sum, or had pulled it out of his pocket. He knew his unfortunate condition himself, and was often taken with spells of sadness. He used to say to me at times:

“Nastiya, fate has made me a cripple, and my nature is an insane one: either I’m gay somehow, like just before some misfortune⁠—or else I have such a melancholy spell, especially in summer, during the heat, with all this dust, that I could just lay hands on myself! I’ll die; they’ll bury me in the Chernoslobodskaya cemetery⁠—and this dust will swirl for all eternity on to my grave, from beyond the enclosing wall!”

“But, now, Nicanor Matveich, why take on so about that? We don’t feel such things when we’re dead.”

“Why,” he says, “what of it that we won’t feel them⁠—the trouble is that one thinks about them while one is still alive.⁠ ⁠…”

And, to tell the truth, it was awful wearisome in the house, in the Samokhvalovs’, when everybody would fall asleep after dinner, and the wind would be swirling this dust along! And he had laid hands on himself just at the time of the greatest heat, at the dullest time. Our whole town, to tell the truth, is wearisome. I was in Tula the other day, now⁠—why, you can’t even compare them!

A Night Conversation I

The sky had been silvery with stars all night long, the fields beyond the garden and the threshing floor was darkling evenly, and the windmill, with the two horns of its wings, showed sharply black against the clear horizon. But the stars gave out sparks, trembling, frequently cutting the sky with narrow green streaks; the garden was fitfully murmurous, and already chill autumn could be heard in its murmurings. From the direction of the mill, from the sloping plain, from the desolated stubble-field, a strong wind was blowing.

The farm hands had sated themselves at supper⁠—it was the holiday of the Assumption of the Holy Virgin⁠—and had avidly smoked their fill on their way through the garden to the threshing barn. Having thrown on their long great coats, tight at the waist, and falling in folds over their short sheepskin coats, they were going there to sleep, to guard the heaps of grain. Following behind the farm hands, dragging a pillow, walked the master’s son, a tall high school student, with three white borzoi hounds running at his heels. Upon the threshing floor, in the fresh wind, there was a pleasant smell of chaff, of new rye straw. They all lay down comfortably in it, in the very biggest stack of all, as near as possible to the piles of grain and the corn kiln. The dogs fussed about, rustled for a while at the feet of the workers, and also quieted down.

Over the heads of the recumbent men the broad Milky Way, dividing into two smokily-translucent branches, glimmered whitely and faintly, filled with the fine star dust suspended within them. It was quiet and warm in the straw. But a northeast wind, again and again, ran disquietingly through the brushwood that was darkling along the ditch to the left, with its rampart of earth; and increasing, it neared with an inimical noise. Then a cool breath would reach the face, the hands, together with a bad odour from the lanes between the heaps of grain. And over the horizon, beyond the irregular black blotches of the brushwood, icy diamonds vividly flared up; the Capella was bursting into varicoloured fires.

Having settled down, they all shut their eyes, after a yawning spell. The wind was dreamily rustling the prickling straws that stuck out above their heads. But its coolness reached their faces, and they all felt that they did not want to sleep