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

Don’t reproach me. I’m not afraid on his account⁠—he won’t shoot himself; and I’m not afraid on my own account either: he will be solemnly silent all his life. Still, I confess, for some reason or other, I feel vaguely sad.⁠ ⁠… But all this will pass in Petersburg, like the impression of a bad dream.

I kiss you, my beloved one. Write to me in Petersburg.

Your K.

My dear Angry Friend,

I write “angry” because I can imagine first your stupefaction and then your anger when you receive this letter and learn by it that I have not kept my word, that I have deceived you and have suddenly left the town instead of waiting for you tomorrow evening in my hotel, as had been decided. My darling, I have simply run away from you, or rather from us both, have run away from that torturing, that awkward, and unnecessary tension which unfailingly would have sprung up between us again.

And don’t hasten, with that caustic smile of yours, to accuse me of a saving wisdom, for you know, more than anyone on earth, how that leaves me when I am most in need of it. God is my witness that, up to the last minute, I did not know whether I should really go or not. Even now I am not at all sure that I shall resist to the end the intolerable temptation to have one more look at you, if only one more, even fugitively, even from a distance.

I don’t even know that I shall keep myself sufficiently in hand not to jump out of this railway carriage after the third bell. That is why, when I have finished this letter (if I can only manage to finish it) I shall give it to a porter and tell him to post it at the very moment when the train starts. And I shall watch him from the window and feel, as if I were actually saying goodbye to you, that painful oppression of the heart.

Forgive me. All that I told you about lemons and sea air and doctors who wanted to send me here from Petersburg, was untrue. I came here solely because I was irresistibly drawn to you, aching to recapture a poor little particle of that burning, dazzling happiness which sometimes we revelled in prodigally and carelessly, like czars in fairy tales.

From what I have told you, I think you must have gathered a rather clear picture of my mode of life in that gigantic Zoo which is called Petersburg society: visits, theatres, balls, my compulsory at home days, the charity bazaars, etc., etc., in all of which I must play the role of a decorative advertisement to my husband’s career and business affairs. But please don’t expect from me the usual tirade about the meanness, the emptiness, the flatness, the falsehood⁠—I’ve forgotten how they put it in our society novels. I have been drawn into this life, with its comforts, its good manners, its novelties, its connections, its associations, and I should never have the force to tear myself away from it. But my heart has no share in it. Some sort of people flash before my eyes, repeat some sort of words, and I myself do things of some sort, talk about something, but neither the people nor the words reach my soul, and sometimes all this seems to be happening far, far away from me, as if in a book or a picture, as though it were all “arranged,” as Domnoushka, my old nurse, used to say.

And suddenly, in this dull, indifferent life I was caught up by a wave from our dear, sweet past. Did you ever happen to wake up from one of those strange dreams which are so joyous that, after them, one goes about the whole day in a state of blissful intoxication, and which are at the same time so feeble in themselves, that if you repeated them, not merely to a stranger, but to your dearest friend on earth, they would sound null and flat, almost grotesque? “Dreamers often lie,” says Shakespeare’s Mercutio, and, my God, what a deep psychological truth there is in that.

Well then I, too, once woke up after such a dream. I saw myself in a boat with you, somewhere far out to sea. You were holding the oars and I was lying in the stern, looking up at the blue sky. That was the whole dream. The boat was rocking slightly and the sky was so blue that sometimes I seemed to be looking into a bottomless abyss. And a kind of unattainable feeling of joy permeated my soul with such tenderness, such harmony, that I wanted to cry and laugh at the same moment from too much happiness, I woke up, but the dream remained in my soul as if it had taken root in it. With a little effort of imagination, I was often able to recall it and to recapture a pale shadow at least of my dream.

Sometimes it would come to me in the drawing-room, during some lifeless conversation, which one listens to without hearing, and then I would have to cover my eyes with my hand for a moment to hide their unexpected gleam. Oh, how powerfully, how inevitably, I was drawn to you! How that captivating, magic tale of our love that flashed into my life six years ago under those caressing southern skies rises up before me, newborn in such moments. Everything comes back to me in a rush: our sudden quarrels, stupid jealousies, the comic suspicions and the joyous reconciliations, after which our kisses renewed their first fresh charm, the eagerly anticipated meetings, the feeling of sad emptiness in those minutes, after parting in the evening only to see each other again the next morning, when, again and again, we would turn at the same moment and our eyes would meet over the shoulders of