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

you don’t know either, but we both know quite well that this need of the human heart is ineradicable, that there is no life apart from it and that there is a great mystery in this. You, too, you know, write solely because of this craving, and indeed you give yourself up to it completely.

I have always read a great deal and kept diaries like all who are dissatisfied with life; I had read some of your things, too, but only a few, though, of course, your name was familiar to me. And then came this new book of yours.⁠ ⁠… How strange it is! A hand far away writes something, a mind shows the tiniest glimpse of its hidden life⁠—for what can words express, even your words!⁠—and suddenly space and time and difference in destinies seem to vanish and your thoughts and feelings become mine, become common to us. Truly there is only one single soul in the world. Don’t you understand then my impulse to write to you, to express something, to share something with you, to complain? Are not your books exactly the same thing as my letters to you? You, too, say things to someone, you send your lines to some unknown friend out there in the distance. You, too, complain for the most part, you know, for complaining, or in other words, asking for sympathy is the most essential characteristic of man. How much of it there is in songs, in prayers in poems, in declarations of love!

Perhaps you will answer me, if only with two words? Do!

October 13th.

I am writing to you again in my bedroom at night. An absurd desire torments me to tell you something that it is so easy to call naive and that cannot in any case be expressed adequately. It really comes to very little⁠—only that I feel very sad, very sorry for myself, and yet that I am happy in this sadness and in being sorry for myself. I am sad to think that I am in a foreign land, at the furthest edge of Western Europe, at a strange house in the midst of the autumn darkness and the sea mist that stretches right out to America. I am sad to be alone not only in this cosy and charming room but in the whole world. And the saddest thing of all is that you, whom I have invented and from whom I already expect something, are so infinitely far from me and so unknown and alien to me in spite of anything I may say⁠—and are so right to keep aloof.⁠ ⁠…

In reality everything in the world is beautiful⁠—even this lampshade and the golden glow of the lamp, and the glistening white linen on my bed, and my dressing gown, and my foot in the slipper and my thin hand below the wide sleeve. And one feels infinitely sorry: what is the good of it all? All will pass, all is passing and all is in vain⁠—just as my everlasting expectation of some thing which takes with me the place of life.

Write to me, I beg you. Just two or three words, simply so that I might know that you hear me. Forgive my insistence.

October 15th.

This is our town, our cathedral. The deserted rocky beach⁠—the view on the first postcard I sent you⁠—lies further north. The town and the cathedral are black and gloomy. Granite, slate, asphalt and rain, rain⁠ ⁠…

Yes, write to me briefly, I quite understand that you can have nothing but two or three words to say to me and believe me, I will not mind in the least. But do write!

October 21st.

Alas, there is no letter from you. And it is already a fortnight since I first wrote to you.

But perhaps the publisher has not yet forwarded my letters to you? Perhaps you are taken up with urgent work, with social engagements? It would be a great pity, but it is better to believe this than to think that you have simply taken no notice of my entreaties. It wounds me to think this. You will say I have no claim on your attention and that, therefore, there can be no question of my being wounded. But is it true that I have no claim on you? Perhaps I have, since I have a certain feeling for you? Has there ever existed a Romeo who did not claim reciprocity, even if he had not the slightest ground for it, or an Othello who had not a right to be jealous? They both say “If I love you, how can you not love me, how can you be false to me?” This is not a mere desire for love, it is much deeper and more complex. If I love someone or something, it is already mine, it is in me⁠ ⁠… I cannot explain it to you clearly, I only know that this is what people have always felt, and it seems to me that there is something very profound in it. Everything in the world is wonderful and incomprehensible.⁠ ⁠…

But be that as it may, still there is no answer from you and I am writing to you again. I invented all of a sudden that you are in some way near to me⁠—though, again, is it a mere invention on my part? I came to believe my own fancy and began writing to you persistently and I already know that the longer I go on with it the more necessary it will be to me, because some bond will be growing up between you and me. I do not picture you to myself, I do not see your physical form at all. To whom do I write then? To myself? But it does not matter I, too, am you.

And yet⁠—do answer me!

October 22nd.

It is a lovely day today, I feel lighthearted, the windows are open and the warm air and the sunshine make one