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

a great tea firm, besides having arranged two other posts for himself⁠—and it is now the sixth year that he has been living here in the tropics, clad in no mean powers.⁠ ⁠… It is a rare European who would have so easily cancelled his fate, amazing in its successfulness⁠—or even his specialty, which had taken so many years of toil to acquire! No European would have yielded himself to the whims of chance, or have shouldered not only a governmental post, but also a steamship agency and a tea business; or have started, along with all these, certain affairs with pearl-bearing shells; or would have maintained a black mistress all his own⁠—a rare beauty, according to rumour⁠—to the wonder of the whole city.⁠ ⁠… He keeps his counsel very much to himself, but at times he is very tactless; reveals, with equal force, now great firmness of character, now unrestraint; now secretiveness, now loquacity. He flaunts his common origin and at the same time boasts of his acquaintance with people of rank; swears, for all he is worth, at the Russian Government⁠—and with evident pride keeps on his desk a photographic portrait of a Russian Grand Duke, handsome and rather young, who had personally bestowed this portrait upon him, with a short signature in autograph. When he is narrating something that, in his opinion, is humorous, he frequently does not comprehend that the point of this amusing matter may be interpreted not at all to his advantage⁠—for example, it was from no other source than his own stories that the guest found out that Zotov had appeared as far too omniscient, almost as a passerby, to those men of affairs in Siberia and Manchuria with whom he so rapidly attained to terms of intimacy, whom he so quickly charmed at first with his obligingness and sociability, his mannerisms of a man used to living on a grand scale, a man conversant with what is what, in absolutely all things, beginning with cigars, wine, women, and culminating with some excavations on the Philippine Islands, rather lethal, it would seem, on account of an earthly microbe.⁠ ⁠…

In the evening the guest rides with him beyond the city.

Beyond the city, on the shore of the ocean, stands a small but a very fashionable restaurant, where the tourists and the residents rest from the sultriness of the city, drinking tea, brandy, and champagne, and admiring the sunset from the front piazza of the restaurant. They come there in tiny rickshaws, following one another, over an endless road amid age-old vegetation, past bungalows and past the huts of the savages. And for a whole hour the guest from Russia sees before him only the naked body of a brown man, carrying him at a run farther and farther under the green vault of the branches of spreading trees; and beyond him, beyond this body and black-haired head, the big white figure of Zotov, sitting high and erect in his little carriage. Halfway to their destination he suddenly turns around and, raising his stick, calls out to his guest:

“Would you care to drive in?”

For answer the guest assents⁠—Zotov had pointed out a small Buddhistic monastery⁠—and the savages, breathing heavily, bathed in perspiration, roll up along the passage way, lying between the cabins, that stand underneath the palms and all other species of trees.

“Well, isn’t this like a bit of our own; isn’t this Russian?” Zotov is saying, stepping out of his carriage. “Only in our country is there so unconscionably much of this verdure, of this forest, so many of these hovels, so many dirty urchins like these! Just look!” he is saying, pointing with his stick at the trees, at the huts and their roofs of leaves and of rushes, at the naked children, and at the natives, young and old, who have surrounded the little carriages in their curiosity. “And the evening, too, is like one of our own⁠—oppressive, and so wearisome, so wearisome!” he is saying in irritation, going in the direction of the old idol temple standing on a knoll underneath slender coconut palms, where a priest is already waiting, clad in a yellow mantle, with his right shoulder bared⁠—his shaven head is small and pressed in at the temples, and his eyes are black, almost insane, and have an intense gaze.

Having entered the dark little sanctuary, the compatriots take off their helmets, wet with perspiration and cool on the inner side. The priest points a finger at their heads and shakes his head: as much as to say that this is not required.

“A lot you know, you fool,” says Zotov in Russian; and for a long while, with a certain strange gravity, gazes at the fourteen-foot wooden statue, gilded and painted in red and yellow, lying on its side beyond a sacrificial altar of black stone, upon which are heaped small coins and nickel rings, and with the slenderest of brown joss-sticks sending forth thin jets of aromatic smoke standing upon it.

“And how he is painted and lacquered all over, though!” says Zotov jerkily. “Every bit just like the wooden bowls and cups sold at our fairs!”

And he carelessly tosses a heavy gold coin upon the silver plate extended by the priest.⁠ ⁠…

When they arrive at the restaurant, his face is almost chalky, and it is a frightful thing to see the black spectacles upon it. “For two whole hours I have not been poisoning myself with anything, have drunk nothing, nor have I smoked; and because of all that I have become dead tired,” he is saying. And just as soon as he is seated at a small table on the little terrace before the restaurant, over the steep shore, cumbered below with blue boulders that eternally bathe in the warm water of the ocean, he immediately orders champagne.

The wine is very chill, and they both drink it avidly, rapidly growing tipsy, and contemplate the darkening lilac ocean, the infinitely distant sunset, turbidly and tenderly roseate. A faint, warm breeze is stirring; the