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

fixed on the window, and I thought there were tears in them.

Do you know what comparison occurred to me while we silently reviewed our dear, touching memories? It was as though we had met, after years of separation, at the tomb of someone whom we had both at one time loved with equal fondness. A quiet cemetery⁠ ⁠… spring⁠ ⁠… young grass all round; the lilacs are blossoming, and we are standing beside the familiar tomb, unable to go, unable to shake off the sad, confused, and endlessly dear phantoms that have claimed us. This dead being⁠—it is our old love, my darling.

Suddenly you broke the silence, jumping up and pushing your chair sharply away.

“No,” you exclaimed, “this is impossible, this is becoming torment.” I could hear how painfully your voice shook. “For God’s sake, let us get out into the fresh air, or I shall break down or go mad.”

We went out. The transparent, soft, tawny darkness of the spring evening was already in the air, enveloping with amazing lightness, delicacy, and distinctness the angles of buildings, the branches of trees, and the contours of human figures. When we had passed the boulevards you called a cab, and I knew already where you wished to take me.

There everything is as it once was. The long stretch of yellow sand, carefully pounded down, the bright blue lights of hanging electric lanterns, the playful, exhilarating sounds of the military orchestra, the long rows of little marble tables, occupied by men and women, the indistinct and monotonous talk of the crowd, the hastily darting waiters, the never-changing, stimulating environment of an expensive restaurant. Heavens, how quickly, how ceaselessly the human being changes, and how permanent and immovable are the places and things that surround him. In this contrast, there is always something infinitely sad and mysterious. You know, it has sometimes been my lot to stumble on bad lodgings, not merely bad, but disgusting, utterly impossible, and, in addition to this, to encounter a whole series of unpleasant incidents, disappointments, illness. When you change lodgings like those, you really think that you have entered the zone of heaven. But a week or so later it is enough to pass by chance that very house and glance up at the empty windows with the white placards stuck on them, for your soul to become oppressed by a painful, languid regret. It is true that everything there was odious, distressing, but, all the same, you seem to have left there a whole strip of your life, a strip that you cannot recover.

Just as before, girls with baskets of flowers were standing at the doors of the restaurant. Do you remember how you used always to choose for me two roses, one dark crimson and the other tea-coloured? As we were driving past, I noticed, by a sudden movement of your hand, that you wanted to do the same, but you pulled yourself up in time. How grateful I was to you for this, my dear one!

Under hundreds of curious eyes, we made our way to the same little arbour that juts out so impertinently over the seafront at a fearful height, so that, when you look down, leaning over the railing, you cannot see the shore and you seem to be swimming in the air. Beneath our feet, the sea was clamouring; at this height it looked so dark and terrible. Not far from the shore, large black, angular rocks emerged from the water. The waves were constantly rushing at them, breaking themselves against them and covering them with mounds of white foam. When the waves retreated, the wet, polished flanks of the rocks shone as if they had been varnished and reflected the lights of the electric globes. Sometimes a gentle little breeze would blow up, saturated with such a strong, healthy smell of seaweed, fish, and salt ozone, that one’s lungs expanded from it, of their own accord, and one’s nostrils dilated.

But something bad, dull, and constraining was more and more surely chaining us down.⁠ ⁠…

When champagne was brought in, you filled my glass and you said with gloomy gaiety:

“Well, let us try to get a little artificial life. ‘Let us drink this good, brave wine,’ as the fiery French say.”

No, in any case, “the good, brave wine” would not have helped us. You grasped that yourself, for you added immediately, with a long sigh:

“Do you remember how we used to be, both of us, from morning till night, drunk without wine merely from our love and the joy of life?”

Below, on the sea, near the rocks, a skiff appeared, its large white stately sails swinging prettily as it dipped and rose through the waves. In the skiff, one could hear a woman’s laugh, and someone, probably a foreigner, was whistling, quite in tune with the orchestra, the melodies of the Waldteufel waltz.

You too were following the sails with your eyes, and, still looking at it, you said dreamily:

“It would be nice to get into a little boat like that and go far out to sea, out of sight of land.⁠ ⁠… Do you remember how we used to do it in the old days?”

“Yes, our old days are dead.⁠ ⁠…”

It slipped from me unintentionally, in answer to my thoughts, and immediately I was frightened by the unexpected effect that the words produced on you. You grew suddenly so white and threw yourself back in your chair so quickly that I thought you were fainting. A minute later, you began to speak in a strangled voice that seemed suddenly to have become hoarse:

“How oddly our thoughts have met. I was just thinking the same. It seems to me fantastic, unreal, impossible that it was really we, not two other people, quite strangers to us, who, six years ago, loved each other so madly and revelled in life so fully, so beautifully. Those two have long ceased to belong to this world. They have died⁠ ⁠… died.⁠ ⁠…”

We returned to the town. The road ran through cluster after cluster of