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

and afterward, after prayer and holy meditation, he did summon her to him on a certain fearsome hour and commanded her to her end. Yes, that is just the way he spoke to her: ‘My joy, thy time has come! Remain thou in my memory just as glorious as thou now art, standing before me in this hour; depart to God!’ And what think ye? Within four and twenty hours she did forsake this life. She lay down, burning as with a fire⁠—and passed out. True, he did console her⁠—he confided to her before her end that by reason of her not having been able, during the first days of her novitiate, to keep just a few things of his secret discourses, only her lips would be rotted. He offered up silver coins for her funeral, and coppers to be given out at her burial; a bundle of candles for a forty days’ mass for her; a yellow candle worth a whole rouble for her coffin; and the coffin itself⁠—rounded out, of oak, hollowed out of one piece. And he blessed her as she was laid out, slender and just a trifle too tall, within that coffin, with her hair all let out, in two shroud-shifts. She was in an under-cassock of white, with a black selvage all around, and in a black mantle with white crosses on top of it; upon her little head they put a green little cap of velvet, broidered with gold; on top of the cap a small skull cap; and after that they tied a blue shawl with tassels upon her head, and then they put a leathern rosary into her dear hands.⁠ ⁠… Oh, I can’t tell how fine they arrayed her. And yet, little ones, there is a spiteful rumour which is of the devil, that she did not want to die⁠—oh, how she didn’t want to!

“Departing in such youth and in such beauty, she took her farewell of everybody, so they say, with tears, saying to all, in a loud voice, ‘Forgive me!’ And at the very last she closed her eyes and said distinctly: ‘And against thee, Mother-Earth, have I sinned in body and soul⁠—wilt thou forgive me?’ And those words are fearful words: touching their foreheads to the earth, men uttered them in the prayer for repentance throughout ancient Russia, before Whitsuntide, before the heathen day of the water nixies.”

The Dreams of Chang

What does it matter of whom we speak? Any that have lived and that live upon this earth deserve to be the subject of our discourse.

Once upon a time Chang had come to know the universe and the captain, his master, to whom his earthly existence had become linked. And six entire years have run since then⁠—have run like the sands in a ship’s hourglass.

It is again night⁠—dream or reality? And again comes morning⁠—reality or dream? Chang is old, Chang is a drunkard⁠—he is always dozing.

Outside, in the city of Odessa, it is winter. The weather is nasty, sullen⁠—far worse than that of China was when Chang and the captain met each other. Fine, stinging snow whirls through the air; it flies obliquely over the ice-covered, slippery asphalt of the desolate seaside boulevard, and painfully lashes the face of every running Jew who, with his hands shoved deep into his pockets, and with his shoulders hunched up, is zigzagging to the left and right⁠—awkwardly, Hebraically. Beyond the harbour, likewise deserted, beyond the bay, hazy from the snow, the barren shores, low and flat, are faintly visible. The jetty is hazy all the time with a thick, gray haze: the sea, in foamy, bellying waves, surges over it from morn till night. The wind whistles and reverberates among the telephone wires overhead.⁠ ⁠…

On such days life in the city does not start at an early hour. Nor do Chang and the captain awake early. Six years⁠—is it a long time, or short? In six years Chang and the captain have grown old, although the captain is not yet forty; and their lot has harshly changed. They no longer sail the seas⁠—they live “on shore,” as seamen say; nor are they living in the same place they lived in at one time, but in a narrow and rather dark street, in a garret; the house is redolent of anthracite, and is occupied by Jews⁠—of the sort that come to their families only toward evening and who sup with their hats shoved on the back of their heads. Chang and the captain have a low ceiling; their room is large and chill. Besides that, it is always gloomy and dark inside; the two windows placed in the sloping wall-roof are small and round, reminding one of portholes. Something in the nature of a chest of drawers stands between the windows, and against the wall to the left is an old iron bed⁠—and there you have all the furnishings of this bleak dwelling⁠—unless the fireplace, out of which a fresh wind is always blowing, be included.

Chang sleeps in the nook behind the fireplace; the captain on the bed. What sort of a bed this is, sagging almost to the floor, and what kind of mattress it has, anyone who has lived in garrets can easily imagine; as for the dirty pillow, it is so scanty that the captain is forced to put his jacket under it. However, the captain sleeps very peacefully even on this bed; he lies on his back, his eyes shut and his face ashen, as motionless as though he were dead. What a splendid bed had formerly been his! Well built, high, with chests underneath; the bedding was thick and snug, the sheets fine and smooth, and the snowy-white pillows were chilling! But even then, even when lulled by the rolling of the waves, he had not slept as heavily as he sleeps now: now he gets very tired during the day, and besides that, what has he to worry about now⁠—what can he