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

the mourners go about the streets.⁠ ⁠… For the pitcher is broken at the fountain, and the wheel broken at the cistern.⁠ ⁠…” But Chang does not feel even terror now. He lies on the floor, his muzzle toward the corner; he has shut his eyes tight that he might not behold the universe, might forget it. And the universe murmurs over him dully and distantly, like the sea over one who descends deeper and deeper into its abyss.

But when he does come to himself again, it is near the doors of a chapel, in the porch. He sits near them with drooping head; dull, half-dead⁠—only he is all shaking in a chill. And suddenly the chapel door is flung open⁠—and a wondrous scene, all mellifluously chanting, strikes the eyes and the heart of Chang. Before Chang is a semi-dark Gothic chamber, with the red stars of flames, a whole forest of tropical plants, a coffin of oak raised high upon a black scaffolding. There is a black throng of people; there are two women wondrous in their marblelike beauty and their deep mourning, who seem just like two sisters of different ages; and, over all this, reverberations, thunder peals, a choir⁠—of men sonorously clamorous of some sorrowful joy of the angels. Solemnity, confusion, pomp⁠—and chantings not of this earth, drowning all else in their strains. And Chang’s every hair stands up on end from anguish and rapture before this sonorous vision. And the artist, who, with reddened eyes, stepped out of the chapel at that moment, stops in amazement:

“Chang!” he says in alarm, stooping down to him, “Chang, what is the matter with you?”

And, laying a hand that has begun to tremble upon Chang’s head, he stoops still lower⁠—and their eyes, filled with tears, meet with such love for each other, that Chang’s entire being cries out inaudibly to all the universe: “Ah, no, no⁠—there is upon earth some third truth, that has not been made known to me!”

That day, having returned from the cemetery, Chang moves into the house of his third master⁠—again up aloft, to a garret; but a garret warm, redolent of cigars, with rugs upon the floor, with antique furniture placed about it, and hung with brocaded stuffs.⁠ ⁠… It is growing dark; the fireplace is filled with glowing, sombrely-scarlet lumps of heat; Chang’s new master is seated in a chair. He had not even taken off his overcoat and his high silk hat upon returning home; he had sat down with his cigar in a deep chair, and is now smoking and gazing into the dusk of his atelier. As for the fatigued, tortured-out Chang⁠—he is lying on a rug near the fireplace, his eyes shut, his muzzle resting on his front paws. And he dreams, he sees as in a vision:

Some One is lying there, beyond the darkening city, beyond the enclosure of the cemetery, in that which is called a crypt, a grave. But this Some One is not the captain⁠—no. If Chang loves and feels the captain, if he sees him with the vision of memory⁠—that divine thing within him which he does not understand himself⁠—it means that the captain is still with him: in that universe, without beginning and without end, which is inaccessible to Death. In this universe there must be but one truth⁠—the third; but what that truth is, is known only to that last Master to whom Chang must now soon return.

A Compatriot

This muzhik of Briansk had been brought from the village to Moscow when he was a little boy; he had run errands at a merchant’s warehouse in Iliyinka; he used to fly like an arrow to taverns to get hot water for tea: seizing the tea kettle, he would dash through the galleries of the Stariya Riyady⁠—the Old Shops⁠—drawing, with a dark jet of water, the figure eight upon the gray floor.⁠ ⁠… On a brisk winter day, perhaps with a light snow falling, the Iliyinka thoroughfare would be black with people; the horses of the cabbies would be shufflingly trotting along⁠—but he, in just his shirt and without a cap (his head resembling a rusty hedgehog), would jump out of the house, dart off the sidewalk, and start sliding on his soles upon the ice in the gutter.⁠ ⁠…

Imagine, then, how strange it is to see this muzhik in the tropics, at the equator! He is sitting in his office in an old-fashioned house of Dutch architecture. Beyond the window lies the white city in the blaze of the sun; there are naked black rickshaw-men, shops of Australian wares and of precious stones, hotels filled with tourists from all the ends of the world; in the warm green water of the harbour float American and Japanese steamers; beyond the harbour, along the lowlands of the shores, grow coconut groves.⁠ ⁠… Clad all in white, tall, knotty, with flaming red hair, with a blueish freckled skin, pale, energetically exhilarated (or, to put it more simply, just daft) from the heat, from nervousness, from constant tipsiness and from business activity⁠—he is, to look at him, either a Swede or an Englishman. His desk is all cluttered with papers, with bills. The air is filled with the crisp rattling of typewriters. An old Hindu, barefooted, in robe and turban, noiselessly and rapidly changes with his dark, exquisite, silver-ringed hands little bottles of cold soda water, and every minute, with a mysterious expression on his face, announces the visitors, adding “Sir” at every word. But the “Sir” is completely absorbed in conversation with his friend from Russia, before whom he is playing the role of the affable lord of this tropical island. Upon the table are several open boxes of the most expensive cigars; of Turkish, Egyptian, English and Havana cigarettes. He is a connoisseur of tobaccos⁠—as well as of everything else, by the way. He regales his guest now with this brand, now with the other, saying, as though in passing: “This, I think isn’t at all bad.⁠ ⁠…”