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

as yet⁠—they had slept their fill after dinner. The high school student alone was languishing from a sweet longing for sleep. But the fleas would not let him sleep. He started scratching, let his thoughts run on wenches, on the widow through whom he, with the help of the farm hand Pashka, had lost his innocence that very summer, and he also became broad awake.

This student was a thin, awkward stripling with an unusually soft colouring⁠—his face was so white that even sunburn had no effect upon it; he was blue-eyed, with outrageously big hands and feet, with a big Adam’s apple. He had not parted company with the farm hands all summer⁠—at first he had carted manure, then the sheaves; he put in order the piles of grain, he smoked an atrocious cheap tobacco, he imitated the muzhiks in speech and in his roughness with wenches, who always started laughing at him in chorus, greeting him with catcalls and cries of “Veretenkin! Veretenkin!”4⁠—a stupid nickname invented by Ivan, who was a helper at the threshing machine. He passed his nights now at the threshing floor, now in the horse stable; he did not change his linen and his canvas clothes for weeks at a time, nor would he take off his tarred boots; he raised blood-blisters on his feet, unaccustomed to coarse foot-cloths; he lost all the buttons on his summer uniform overcoat, which had been soiled by wheels and manure, had broken the letters and the little silver leaves on his uniform cap.

“He has broken away from the house entirely!” his mother would say of him, with a caressing, kindly regret, enraptured even by his defects. “Of course, he’ll pick up, become stronger⁠—but just look what a matted choate he is⁠—he doesn’t even wash his neck!” she would say, smiling to her guests and pulling his soft, chestnut locks, trying to get at the soft little spiral, curling like a girl’s, at the nape of his neck⁠—dark, contrasting with the childishly white flesh visible under the blouse that buttoned at the side, contrasting with the large vertebrae under the fine, smooth skin. But he would sulkily turn his head away from under her caressing hand, frowning and blushing. He grew not by the day but by the hour, and as he walked he stooped, whistling meditatively, angularly lumbering from side to side. He still ate linden blossoms and the gum of cherry trees; he carried, although by now secretly, a slingshot to shoot sparrows with, but he would have been consumed with shame had this been revealed, and he constantly kept his hands in his pockets. Only last winter he had played Redskins with his little sister Lily. But in the spring, when through all the streets of the town streams were running and shimmering with a blinding dazzle; when the white windowsills in the classrooms were aflame with the sun; when the teacher’s room was shot through and through with the sun, and the principal’s cat was lying in ambush for the first finches in the high school garden, still filled with silvery snow⁠—in the spring he had gotten the notion that he had fallen in love with the slender little Youshkova, a bookish, serious-minded high school girl; he had struck up a close friendship with Simashko, a spectacled six-termer, and had determined to dedicate his entire summer vacation to self-culture. But in the summer his dreams about self-culture were already forgotten; a new resolve was taken⁠—to study the common people; which resolve had soon passed into a passionate infatuation with the muzhiks.

On the evening before the Assumption, the high school boy was heavy with sleep while still at supper. Toward the end of every day, when his head would grow heavy and fall down on his chest⁠—from fatigue, from talking with the farm hands, from his role of a grownup⁠—his boyishness returned: he wanted to play a bit with Lily, to have a brief reverie, before falling asleep, of some distant and unknown lands, of extraordinary manifestations of passion and self-sacrifice, of the lives of Livingston and Baker, and not of the muzhiks written about by Naumov and Nephedov, whom he had given his word of honour to Simashko to read; he wanted to sleep, for at least one night, at home, instead of getting up before the sun, in the cold morning light, when even dogs yawn and stretch so languorously.⁠ ⁠… But the maid entered, saying that the farm hands had already gone to the threshing floor. Without listening to his mother’s calls, the high school lad threw his uniform overcoat with its bobbing belt over his shoulders, and put on his cap; grabbing the pillow out of the maid’s hands, he caught up with the farm hands in the lane. He staggered from drowsiness as he walked, dragging the pillow by a corner, and, as soon as he had stumbled up to the heap of straw and had crawled under an old raccoon overcoat lying there, he sailed off into some sweet, black darkness. But the tiny dog-fleas began to burn him as with fire; the farm hands began talking among themselves.⁠ ⁠…

There were five of them: Khomut,5 a kindly, shaggy old man; Kiriushka, a lame, white-eyed, irresponsible lad, who gave himself up to a childish vice, which fact everybody knew and which made Kiriushka still more irresponsible, making him bear in silence all sorts of jeers about his short leg, twisted at the knee; Pashka, a good-looking muzhik of twenty-four and recently married; Theodot, an elderly muzhik, from another region, somewhere near Liebedyana, nicknamed Postnii;6 and Ivan⁠—a very stupid fellow, but one who deemed himself an amazingly clever, cunning, and mercilessly-scoffing man. This last held in contempt all work, save work with agricultural machines; he wore a blue blouse and had impressed everybody with the idea that he was a born machinist, although everybody knew that he did not know a blamed thing about the