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

At night.

Perhaps you have not written to me because I am too abstract for you? Then here are a few more details about me. I have been married for sixteen years. My husband is French, I met him one winter in the French Riviera, we were married in Rome and, after a wedding trip through Italy, settled here for good. I have three children, a boy and two girls. Do I love them? Yes, but not like most mothers whose whole life is in their children and their home. While my children were little I looked after them and shared all their games and occupations, but now they no longer need me, and I have a great deal of leisure, which I spend in reading. My own people are far away, our lives have lain apart, and we have so little in common that we seldom write to each other. Because of my husband’s position I have to go out a great deal, to pay calls and receive people, to go to dances and dinner parties. But I have no intimate friends. I am different from the women here, and I do not believe in friendship between men and women.

But enough about me. If you answer this letter, say something about yourself. What are you like? Where do you live? Do you like Shakespeare or Shelley, Goethe or Dante, Balzac or Flaubert? Are you fond of music, and of what kind of music? Are you married? Are you bound by an old tie of which you are weary, or are you just betrothed and still at that tender and beautiful stage when everything is new and joyous, when as yet there are no tormenting memories that deceive one into believing in a happiness that one missed and passed by?

Write to me if you can.

November 1st.

There is no letter from you. What agony! Such agony that sometimes I curse the day and the hour in which I ventured to write to you.

And the worst of it is that there is no way out. I may assure myself as much as I like that there will be no letter, that I have nothing to expect, and yet go on expecting it: for how can I be sure that it will really not come? Oh, if only I knew for certain that you will not write! Even that would make me happy. But no, no, hope is better! I hope, I wait!

November 3rd.

There is no letter, and my misery continues, though really it is only the morning hours that are bad. I dress very slowly with unnatural composure, my hands cold with secret anxiety; I come down to breakfast and give a music lesson to my daughter, who practises with such diligence, sitting at the piano charmingly straight, as only girls of fifteen can do. At midday the post comes at last, I rush to it, find nothing and grow almost calm till the following morning.

This is a lovely day again. The autumn sun is shining brightly and softly. Many trees in the garden are bare and black, the autumn flowers are in blossom, and unutterably beautiful is the fine blue haze in the valley beyond, seen through the branches of the trees. And there is gratitude in my heart, I do not know to whom and what for. What for, indeed? I have nothing, and nothing to look forward to.⁠ ⁠… And yet, is it true that I have nothing, once there is this heart melting feeling of gratitude?

I am grateful to you, too, for having given me the chance to invent you. You will never know me, you will never meet me, but in this, too, there is much melancholy charm. And perhaps it is a good thing that you do not write to me, that you haven’t written me a single word, and that I do not visualize you at all. Could I have written to you and felt about you as I do now if I had known you or had a letter from you? You would then certainly have been different, certainly have been a little worse, and I would not have felt so free in writing to you.

It is growing cool, but I do not shut my window, I keep gazing at the blue mist over the hills and valleys beyond the garden. And that blue is painfully beautiful⁠—painfully because one feels that one ought to do some thing with it⁠—but what? I do not know. We know nothing!

November 5th.

This is like a diary, and yet it is not one, for I have a reader now, if only an imaginary one.

What is it that impels you to write? A desire to tell a story or to express yourself, even indirectly? The second, of course. Nine-tenths of writers, even of the most renowned ones, are merely storytellers and have really nothing in common with that which deserves the name of art. And what is art? Prayer, music, the song of the human soul.⁠ ⁠… Ah, if only I could leave behind me a few lines just to say that I, too, have lived, loved, rejoiced, that in my life, too, there had been youth, spring, Italy⁠ ⁠… that there is a remote country on the shores of the Atlantic where I live and love, expecting something even now⁠ ⁠… that there are in