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

were silent. Your heart was seething. You overturned chairs, rushed from room to room, struck the floor with your feet, shouted as if pouring your whole thirst for happiness into that shout⁠ ⁠… Then Life struck your heart with the dull knife of pain and humiliation. And you began to cry, and shriek, and call for help.

Not a muscle twitched in the face of Life⁠ ⁠… Give in, give in! And you gave in.

VII

Do you remember how timidly you came out of the nursery, and what you said to me?

“Uncle,” you said, exhausted by your struggle for happiness, and still thirsting for it. “Uncle, forgive me, please.” You begged me for at least a drop of that happiness, the longing for which was bringing you such acute suffering.

But Life is not so easily appeased. It made a sad face and said:

“Of course, the knowledge of figures brings happiness. But you do not love your uncle.”

“It isn’t true, I do love him! I do love him!”

Then Life became kinder.

“Well, bring your chair to the table and get the pencils and some paper.”

With what joy your eyes glistened then! How you rushed about! Fearing that you might anger me, how obedient, how careful were you in every movement that you made! And how eagerly you grasped every word I said!

Taking deep breaths, every little while moistening your pencil with your lips, you bent over the table, laboriously tracing those mysterious lines full of some divine significance. And I watched you, my heart full of pleasure, as I inhaled the odor of your soft hair; for the hair of little children has the odor of little birds.

“One⁠ ⁠… two⁠ ⁠… five” you were saying, tracing the figures.

“No, no. One, two, three, four⁠ ⁠…”

“Oh, yes. Oh, yes,” you would hasten to say. “I’ll start at the beginning. One, two⁠ ⁠…”

And you would look at me in embarrassment.

“Well? Three⁠ ⁠…”

“Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Three! I know.”

And you traced the figure three, and it looked like a large capital E.

Death

In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate!⁠ ⁠…

This is a tale of the death of a prophet⁠—peace to his ashes!⁠—told that the doubters may be convinced of the need for submission to The Leader.

“We have never beheld Him, nor do we behold Him now,” say they. But the sun is not at fault in that vision has been denied to the eyes of a bat. The heart of man aye seeketh faith and protection. But who would seek protection from an owl? It is better to dream of the shadow of the phœnix, even though the phœnix may never have existed in this world. But the protecting shadow of the Creator exists since the start of time.

The black-eared jackal slinks in the steps of a lion: the lion knoweth where the prey is, and the black-eared one findeth sustenance in the remnants of the lion’s repast. Thus did the Hebrews follow their prophet out of the land of Egypt. Through the favour of God did he fulfill the mighty deed he had set out to do.

In his infancy he had experienced the delight of slumber, of awakening, of endearment. The daughter of the king had rocked him in her arms, dark and rounded, smooth as a snake, but as warm as fruit in the sun. Joyously and intently did her dark eyes gaze upon him, as they shone above him; and impulsively did she kiss him, pressing him to her cold breasts; she would pretend to strangle him, as is the wont of all maidens. When recalling the like, many a one exclaims within his heart: “Why was I not a youth then!” But there is a time for all things.

The Pharaoh did bestow upon him a ring with a seal of authority, and did clothe him in the garments of a courtier. When the freshness of the morning is supplanted by the warmth of the sun; when, in the marketplace, the fennel is sprinkled to draw the scent of the purchaser; when there is a smell of burning peat floating from the chimneys, and a smell of fog from the direction of the great river, upon which towering white sails slowly float by, two abreast, the while a thin-bearded buffalo, as dove-coloured and rough-skinned as a swine, dully contemplates them, as he arises from the slime near the bank⁠—at such a time the prophet, conscious of his powers and alertness, did ride about in his chariot, overlooking the labours in the fields, and had the right to lash the lazy ones over the head with his scourge, to yell at them until he became red in the face, so that he might afterwards, in the sweet consciousness of a duty fulfilled, repose in the light shade of the palms, upon a dry dike among the canals.

Having attained manhood, he spent ten years in wedlock. He shared his couch with a woman rich and wellborn; he took his pleasure of her in the night⁠—in the daytime his pleasure lay in his orders and his cares, in drink and food, in the buoyancy of his body, that liked equally well both the dry sultriness of an inner court, emanating from its heated slabs of stone, and the cool breath of a breeze throughout the house, blowing from the river and from the blossoming gardens of its island. He took pride in his children, in his household, in the respect shown to him of all men. And he was happy, even as many others are. But an unseen hand was making taut the bow of his life; it was testing the bowstring and the wood, preparing to loose the arrows of truth. And ten years more did he pass in the striving of his mind and his heart, in the silent acquirement of the wisdom of Egypt; for the wall is preceded by the foundation, and speech, by thought. And he hath said of the heathen priests: “Ye men of folly! Slaves, tormented by heat, may