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

cicadas are drowsily strumming in the brushwood.⁠ ⁠… And suddenly Zotov flings his cigarette far from him, quickly lights another, and again, with the pertinacity of a maniac, begins talking of the similarity of this island and Russia.

The guest smiles. Zotov, hurriedly and not at all clearly, argues with him. The matter does not lie, he urges, merely in an outward resemblance.⁠ ⁠… And it was not even the resemblance that he had in view, but rather his reactions.⁠ ⁠… Perhaps these reactions are not firm, are unwholesome⁠—but then, that is another matter.⁠ ⁠… The devil himself would go out of his mind in a climate like this⁠—it is not a climate to be trifled with.⁠ ⁠… But now, in a discussion of all the various dangers of the Far East, people somehow forget entirely about that fact; messieurs the Aryans, and especially we Russians, ought to carry out our conquering expeditions into the tropics with extreme cautiousness, recalling with a greater frequence our forefathers and their conquest of Hindustan, so significantly terminating in Buddhism⁠—when all is said and done, it is we, the Aryans, after Tibet intruding ourselves into the tropics, who have given birth to this teaching, with its appallingly inapplicable wisdom! And then he warmly begins to asseverate that “all the force of the thing” lies in that he had already seen, had already felt the tropics even before his arrival here, at some time very remote, perhaps a thousand years ago⁠—with the eyes and the soul of his most distant ancestor.⁠ ⁠…

He tells⁠—with a subtlety, passionateness and an eloquence never to be expected from him⁠—that he had experienced extraordinary sensations on the way over here, on those sultry, starry nights when he had first beheld the Southern Cross, Canopus, and those first-created starry mists that are called the Clouds of Magellan; when he had beheld the Coal Sacks, those funereal fissures into the infinitude of universal voids; and the awesome magnificence of the Alpha of the Centaur, glimmering upon the utterly empty horizon, where some immeasurable Nothingness, unattainable to our reason, seemed to be in its inception. “Yes, yes!” exclaims he insistently, fixing the guest with his spectacles: “The horizon was utterly empty about the Alpha! A spectacle of a new world, of new heavens, was opened before me, but it seemed to me⁠—and this sensation was vivid to the verge of terror within me, I assure you!⁠—it seemed to me that I had seen them before, once upon a time. All the days and all the nights a smooth, dead swell rocked us wide on the ocean. We were sailing toward an Eastern monsoon; it blew sharp and strong, and its ceaseless current of air made the sailyards hum and blurred the vision, and made our speed seem rapid.⁠ ⁠… Awaking at night in the hot darkness of my cabin, I, in order to rest after the exhausting sleep, would go on the upper decks, out into the wind, under the stars⁠—altogether different from those I had seen all my life, from my very birth, and with which I had already grown intimate; stars that were altogether, altogether different⁠—yet at the same not altogether new, seemingly, but as though they were dimly recalled. Under their dim light hovered the ceaseless noise of the sea, the steamer rolled slowly from one side to the other, and, like strangled suicides in gray shrouds, with arms outspread, the long canvas ventilators swayed and quivered near the funnel, avidly catching with their orifices the freshness of the monsoon, upon which was already borne toward us the hot breath of the dread Land of our First Parents. And at such times I would be seized by such melancholy⁠—a melancholy of some infinitely remote recollection⁠—that one can not express in human speech even a hundredth part of it!”

A faint, delightful breeze is stirring; there is a drowsy strumming in the brushwood. The twilight begins to swell as with sap with that faery orange-aureate colour which always arises in the tropics when some time had elapsed after the sunset. The surf boils up in orange-aureate foam; the faces and the white costumes are bathed in an orange-aureate light.⁠ ⁠…

“How connect that with which he amazed me today with what he is amazing me now?” the guest from Russia is reflecting, almost in fear, about his astonishing compatriot. But the latter, is looking at him through his black spectacles and is stubbornly reiterating:

“Yes, yes⁠—I have already been here.⁠ ⁠… And, in general, I am a doomed man.⁠ ⁠… If you but knew how dreadfully muddled my affairs are! Even more, it would seem, than my soul and my thoughts.⁠ ⁠… Oh, well, there is a way out of everything! Just jerk back the trigger of your revolver, having thrust its muzzle as far as possible into your mouth⁠—and all these affairs, thoughts, and emotions will fly into pieces to the devil and his dam!”

Kasimir Stanislavovitch

On the yellow card with a nobleman’s coronet the young porter at the Hotel “Versailles” somehow managed to read the Christian name and patronymic “Kasimir Stanislavovitch.”15 There followed something still more complicated and still more difficult to pronounce. The porter turned the card this way and that way in his hand, looked at the passport, which the visitor had given him with it, shrugged his shoulders⁠—none of those who stayed at the “Versailles” gave their cards⁠—then he threw both on to the table and began again to examine himself in the silvery, milky mirror which hung above the table, whipping up his thick hair with a comb. He wore an overcoat and shiny top-boots; the gold braid on his cap was greasy with age⁠—the hotel was a bad one.

Kasimir Stanislavovitch left Kiev for Moscow on April 8th, Good Friday, on receiving a telegram with the one word “tenth.” Somehow or other he managed to get the money for his fare, and took his seat in a second-class compartment, grey and dim, but really giving him the sensation of comfort and luxury. The