On a fairy-tale icy evening with a lilac hoar frost in the gardens, the cab man Kasatkin was speeding Glebov in a high, narrow sledge down Tverskaya to the Loskutnaya Hotel – they had dropped into the Yeliseyevs’ for fruit and wine.* It was still light over Moscow, the clear and transparent sky was turning green towards the west, the bays at the tops of the bell towers let the subtle light through, but below, in the grey-blue haze of the frost, it was already getting dark, and motionless and gentle shone the lights of the recently lit streetlamps.
At the entrance to the Loskutnaya, throwing back the wolf-skin travelling rug, Glebov ordered Kasatkin, who was besprinkled with snow dust, to come for him in an hour:
“You’ll take me to the Brest Station.”
“Yes, sir,” replied Kasatkin. “You’re going abroad then.”
“I am.”
Turning his tall, old trotting horse sharply, scraping the metal bindings of the sledge runners, Kasatkin gave his hat a disapproving nod:
“A willing horse needs no spur!”
The large and somewhat neglected vestibule, the spacious lift, and the boy with eyes of different tints and rust-coloured freckles, Vasya, who stood politely in his little tunic while the lift was drawn slowly upwards – it suddenly felt a shame to abandon all this, long familiar, customary. “And really, why am I going?” He looked at himself in the mirror: young, vigorous, wirily thoroughbred, eyes shining, hoar frost on his handsome moustache, well and lightly dressed… it was wonderful in Nice now, Heinrich was an excellent comrade… and the main thing was, it always seemed that somewhere there would be something especially lucky there, some encounter… you would put up somewhere or other on the way – who stayed here before you, what hung or lay in this wardrobe, whose are these women’s hairpins forgotten in the bedside table? Again there would be the smell of gas, coffee and beer at the Vienna station, the labels on the bottles of Austrian and Italian wines on the tables in the sunny restaurant car in the snows of Zemmering, the faces and clothes of European men and women filling the car for lunch… Then night-time, Italy… In the morning, along the route beside the sea towards Nice, there would now be the rides between stations in the clattering and smoking darkness of tunnels, with the lamps burning weakly in the ceiling of the compartment, now the stops, and some gentle and incessant ringing at the little stations covered in flowering roses beside the gulf, which languished in the hot sun like a fusion of precious stones… And he set off quickly down the carpets of Loskutnaya’s warm corridors.
The room was warm and pleasant too. The sunset and the transparent concave sky were still shining into the windows. Everything was tidy, the suitcases were ready. And again he felt a little sad – it was a shame to abandon the familiar room and all of Moscow’s winter life, and Nadya, and Lee…
Nadya was due to drop in and say goodbye at any moment. He hurriedly put the wine and fruits away in a suitcase, threw his overcoat and hat onto the couch behind the round table and immediately heard a rapid knocking at the door. Before he had had time to open it, she had come in and embraced him, all cold and gently fragrant, in a squirrel-skin coat and a squirrel-skin hat, in all the freshness of her sixteen years, the frost, her flushed little face and her clear green eyes.
“Are you going?”
“I am, Nadyusha…”
She sighed and dropped into an armchair, undoing her coat.
“You know, I was taken ill, thank God, during the night… Ah, how I’d love to see you to the station! Why won’t you let me?”
“Nadyusha, you know for yourself it’s not possible, I’m going to be seen off by people you don’t know at all, you’ll feel out of place, lonely…”
“And I think I’d give my life to go with you!”
“And how do I feel? But you know it’s not possible…”
He sat down in the armchair close up against her, kissing her warm little neck, and felt her tears on his cheek.
“Nadyusha, what’s all this?”
She lifted her face and, with an effort, smiled:
“No, no, I won’t… I don’t want to constrain you the way women do, you’re a poet, freedom’s essential for you.”
“You’re my clever girl,” he said, touched by her seriousness and her childish profile – the purity, delicacy and hot flush of her cheek, the triangular cut of her half-parted lips, the questioning innocence of the raised, tear-soaked eyelash. “You’re not like other women, you’re a poetess yourself.”
She stamped on the floor:
“Don’t you dare speak to me about other women!”
And with dying eyes she began whispering in his ear, caressing him with her fur and breath:
“Just for a minute… We still can today…”
* * *
The entrance to the Brest Station shone in the blue darkness of the frosty night. Entering the booming station in the wake of the hurrying porter, he caught sight of Lee at once: slim, tall, in a straight, oily-black astrakhan fur coat and a large, black velvet beret, from under which black ringlets hung down her cheeks in long curls; she kept her hands inside a large astrakhan muff, and her black eyes looked at him angrily, terrifying in their magnificence.
“You’re leaving after all, you good-for-nothing,” she said indifferently, taking him by the arm and hurrying along with him in the wake of the porter in her high, grey overshoes. “Just you wait, you’ll be sorry, you won’t find another like me, you’ll be left with your idiot of a poetess.”
“That idiot is still just a child, Lee – you should be ashamed of thinking God knows what.”
“Be quiet. I’m not an idiot. And if that ‘God knows what’ really is going on, I’ll throw sulphuric acid over you.”
From under the prepared train, lit from above by matt electric globes, there belched hotly hissing grey steam that smelt of rubber. The international coach stood out with its yellowish wooden facing. Inside, in its narrow, red-carpeted corridor, in the mottled sheen of the walls, upholstered in stamped leather, in the thick, granular glass panels in the doors, foreign parts were already there. The Polish carriage attendant in a brown uniform jacket opened the door into a small compartment, very hot, with tight bedding already prepared, and softly lit by a table lamp under a red silk shade.
“How lucky you are!” said Lee. “You’ve even got your own privy here. And who’s next door? Maybe some bitch of a travelling companion?”
And she pulled at the door into the next compartment.
“No, this is locked. Well, your God’s a lucky one. Kiss me quickly, it’ll be the third bell soon…”
From the muff she pulled a hand, pale and bluish, refined and thin, with long, sharp fingernails, and, writhing, she embraced him impetuously, flashing her eyes immoderately, kissing and biting now his lips, now his cheeks, and whispering:
“I adore you, I adore you, you good-for-nothing!”
* * *
Outside the black window, big, orange sparks rushed backwards like a fiery witch, and there were glimpses of white snowy slopes lit up by the train and black thickets of pine forest, secretive and morose in their immobility and the mystery of their wintry nocturnal life. He closed the red-hot heater underneath the table, lowered the heavy blind onto the cold glass and knocked on the door beside the washbasin which connected his and the next compartment. The door opened inwards and, laughing, in came Heinrich, very tall, in a grey dress, with gingery-lemon hair dressed in a Greek style, delicate facial features like an Englishwoman’s and lively, amber-brown eyes.
“Well then, have you said all your goodbyes? I heard everything. Best of all I liked the way she tried forcing her way into my compartment and called me a bitch.”
“Are you starting to get jealous, Heinrich?”
“I’m not starting, but continuing. If she weren’t so dangerous, I’d have demanded her complete dismissal long ago.”
“And that’s just the point, that she’s dangerous, you try dismissing someone like that all at once! And then I do, after all, tolerate your Austrian, and the fact that the day after tomorrow you’ll be sleeping with him.”
“No, I won’t be sleeping with him. You know very well that I’m going first and foremost to break up with him.”
“You could have done that in writing. And could very well have gone direct with me.”
She sighed and sat down, adjusting her hair with gleaming fingers, touching it softly and crossing her feet in their grey suede shoes with silver buckles.
“But my dear, I want to part with him in such a way as to have the opportunity of continuing to work with him. He’s a calculating man and he’ll accept an amicable break. Who will he find capable of supplying his journal with all the theatrical, literary and artistic scandals of Moscow and St Petersburg the way I do? Who will translate and place his brilliant novellas? Today’s the fifteenth. So you’ll be in Nice on the eighteenth, and I’ll be there no later than the twentieth or the twenty-first. And that’s enough about that – after all, you and I are first and foremost good friends and comrades.”
“Comrades,” he said, gazing joyfully at her delicate face, with scarlet, transparent colour on the cheeks. “Of course, I shall never have a better comrade than you, Heinrich. It’s only with you that I always feel easy, free, that I can truly talk about everything as with a friend, but you know what the problem is? I’m falling in love with you more and more.”
“And where were you yesterday, in the evening?”
“In the evening? At home.”
“And with whom? Oh, who cares. But you were seen during the night in the Strelna, you were in some sort of large group in a private room with gypsies. Now that really is bad form – Styopas, Grushas, their fateful eyes…”
“And Viennese drunkards like Przybyszewski?”*
“They, my dear, are a thing of chance and not my field at all. Is she really as good-looking as they say, this Masha?”
“Neither is the gypsy thing my field, Heinrich. And Masha…”
“Come on, describe her to me.”
“No, you’re getting decidedly jealous, Yelena Heinrichovna. What is there to describe, have you never seen gypsies or something? Very thin, and not even good-looking – flat, tar-coloured hair, quite a coarse, coffee-coloured face, the whites of her eyes senseless and bluish, equine collarbones with a large, yellow sort of necklace, a flat stomach… it all looks very good, though, with a long silk dress the colour of golden onion skin. And you know, when she picks a shawl of old heavy silk up in her arms and, to the sound of tambourines, starts giving glimpses of her little shoes from under her hem, shaking her long silver earrings – it’s simply a calamity! But let’s go and eat.”
She stood up with a little grin:
“Let’s. You’re incorrigible, my dear. But we’ll make do with what God gives us. Look how nice we have it here. Two wonderful little rooms!”
“And one of them quite superfluous.”
She threw a knitted Orenburg headscarf over her hair, he put on a travelling cap, and they set off swaying down the endless tunnels of the carriages, crossing clanking iron bridges in the cold, draughty concertinas with a scattering of snow dust in between them.
He returned alone – he had sat in the restaurant smoking while she had gone on ahead. When he returned, in the warm compartment he felt the happiness of a completely domestic night. She had thrown back the corner of the blanket and sheet on the bed, had got his nightclothes out, put the wine on the table and the pears in a box made out of laths, and she was standing in front of the mirror above the washbasin holding hairpins between her lips, with her bare arms lifted to her hair and her full breasts on display, already in just her shift, with bare legs and wearing slippers trimmed with polar fox. Her waist was slim, her hips of full weight, her ankles light and chiselled. He kissed her for a long time standing up, then they sat down on the bed and started drinking the hock, kissing again with lips cold from the wine. Feasting his eyes, he exposed her legs up as far as her belly, up to the ginger hair, their rounded largeness with the almond lustre of the knees.
“And Lee?” she said. “And Masha?”
* * *
In the night, lying beside her in the darkness, with light-hearted sadness he said:
“Ah, Heinrich, how I love such railway-carriage nights, this darkness in the speeding carriage, the lights of a station glimpsed behind the blind – and you, you, ‘human women, the net for the enticement of man’! That ‘net’ is something truly inexpressible, divine and devilish, and when I write about this, try to express it, I’m accused of shamelessness, of low motives… Base spirits! It’s well put in one old book: ‘A writer has the same absolute right to boldness in his verbal depictions of love and its characters as has at all times been granted in that respect to painters and sculptors: only base spirits see baseness even in what is beautiful or terrible.’”
“And of course, Lee,” asked Heinrich, “has small, sharp breasts that stick out in different directions? A sure sign of a hysterical woman.”
“Yes.”
“Is she stupid?”
“No… Actually, I don’t know. Sometimes she seems to be very intelligent, sensible, straightforward, easy and cheerful, she grasps everything at the very first word, but sometimes she spouts such highfaluting, vulgar or vicious, bad-tempered nonsense that I sit and listen to her with the tension and vacancy of an idiot, like someone deaf and dumb… But you’re getting on my nerves, asking about Lee.”
“I’m getting on your nerves because I don’t want to be a comrade to you any more.”
“I don’t want it any more either. And I say again: write to that Viennese scoundrel that you’ll see him on the return journey, but now you’re unwell, you need to have a holiday in Nice after influenza. And we’ll stay together and go not to Nice, but somewhere in Italy…”
“And why not to Nice?”
“I don’t know. I suddenly don’t want to any more for some reason. The main thing is, we’ll go together!”
“Darling, we’ve already talked about this. And why Italy? You were assuring me that you’d grown to hate Italy.”
“Yes, that’s true. I’m angry at it because of our aestheticizing numskulls. ‘In Florence I like only the trecento…’ Yet he himself was born in Belyevo, and in all his life has been in Florence for just one week. Trecento, quattrocento… And I grew to hate all those Fra Angelicos, Ghirlandaios, the trecento, quattrocento and even Beatrice and lean-faced Dante* in a woman’s bonnet and a laurel wreath… Well, if not to Italy, then let’s go somewhere in the Tyrol, to Switzerland, right into the mountains, to some little stone village in the midst of those granite devils, mottled with snow, poking up into the sky… Just imagine: the pungent, damp air, those barbaric stone huts, steep roofs, huddled beside a humpbacked stone bridge, beneath it the rapid roar of a milky-green stream, the clatter of the bells of a flock of sheep walking ever so tightly packed together, there too a chemist’s and a shop selling alpenstocks, a little hotel, terribly warm, with branching deer antlers above the door, which seem as if specially carved out of pumice… in short, the bottom of a ravine, where for a thousand years this barbarity of the mountains, alien to the whole world, has been living, giving birth, marrying, burying, and where, high above it, some eternally white mountain has been gazing out for all time from behind the blocks of granite, like a giant dead angel… And what girls there are there, Heinrich! Taut, red-cheeked, in black bodices and red woollen stockings…”
“Oh, these poets!” she said with an affectionate yawn. “And again, girls, girls… No, it’s cold in that little village, darling. And I don’t want any more girls…”
* * *
In Warsaw, towards evening, when they were transferring to the Vienna Station, a wet wind was blowing against them and a cold rain falling in large but infrequent drops; the Lithuanian moustache of the wrinkled cabman was blown about as he sat on the box of the spacious carriage, angrily driving on his pair of horses, and the water flowed from his leather peaked cap, and the streets seemed provincial.
Raising the blind at dawn, he saw a plain, pale from the sparse snow, on which, here and there, could be seen the red of little brick houses. They stopped immediately after and stood for quite a time at a large station where, after Russia, everything seemed very small – the carriages on the tracks, the narrow rails, the iron posts of the streetlamps – and everywhere there were piles of black coal; a little soldier with a rifle, wearing a tall kepi the shape of a truncated cone and a short, mousy-blue greatcoat, was walking across the tracks from the locomotive depot; along the wooden planking beneath the windows walked a lanky, moustached man in a check jacket with a rabbit-fur collar and a green Tyrolean hat with a multicoloured feather at the back. Heinrich woke up and asked him in a whisper to lower the blind. He lowered it and lay down in her warmth beneath the blanket. She put her head on his shoulder and started to cry.
“Heinrich, what is it?” he said.
I don’t know, darling,” she replied quietly. “I often cry at dawn. You wake up, and suddenly you feel so sorry for yourself… In a few hours’ time you’ll leave, and I’ll remain alone, I’ll go to a café to wait for my Austrian… And in the evening – a café again, and a Hungarian orchestra, those violins that pain your soul…”
“Yes, yes, and the strident cymbals… That’s what I’m saying: send the Austrian to the devil and on we’ll go.”
“No, darling, I can’t. What am I going to live on if I quarrel with him? But I swear to you, there’ll be nothing between me and him. You know, the last time I was leaving Vienna, he and I were already, as they say, sorting out our relationship – at night, in the street, underneath a gas lamp. And you can’t imagine what hatred there was in his face! His face was pale green, olive, pistachio-coloured from the gas and the spite… But the main thing is, how can I now, after you, after this compartment, which has brought us so very close…”
“Listen, is that true?”
She pressed him up against herself and started kissing him so hard that he was gasping for breath.
“Heinrich, I don’t recognize you.”
“Nor I myself. But come, come to me.”
“Wait…”
“No, no, this minute!”
“Just one word: tell me exactly – when will you be leaving Vienna?”
“This evening, this very evening!”
The train was already moving, and the spurs of the border guards were going softly past the door and ringing against the carpet.
* * *
And there was the Vienna station, and the smell of gas, coffee and beer, and Heinrich drove off, smartly dressed, with a sad smile, in an open landau drawn by a nervous, delicate European jade, with a red-nosed driver on the high box wearing a cape and a lacquered top hat, who took the blanket off the jade, then began bellowing and cracking a long whip when it started jerking its long, aristocratic, worn-out legs and ran askew with its short-cropped tail after a yellow tram. There was Zemmering and all the foreign festiveness of midday in the mountains, a hot left-hand window in the restaurant car, a little bunch of flowers, Apollinaris water and the red wine Feslau on the blindingly white table beside the window, and the blindingly white midday brilliance of the snowy peaks, rising in their solemnly joyous vestments up into the heavenly indigo of the sky within touching distance of the train, which wound along precipices above a narrow abyss, where the wintry shade, still of the morning, was coldly blue. There was a frosty, primordially chaste, pure evening, turning a deathly scarlet and blue towards
night-time, on some pass that was sinking with all its green fir trees in a great abundance of fresh, fluffy snow. Then there was a long wait in a dark gorge beside the Italian frontier, in the midst of a black Dantean hell of mountains and some sort of red, inflamed, smouldering light at the entrance to the smoke-blackened mouth of a tunnel. Then – everything was already completely different, unlike anything that had gone before: an old, peeling, pink Italian station, and the short-legged station soldiers with the pride of cockerels, and cockerels’ feathers on their helmets, and instead of a buffet at the station, a solitary little boy lazily wheeling a barrow past the train, on which there were only oranges and fiascos. And thereafter comes the train’s now free, ever accelerating race down and down, and from the Lombardy plain, dotted in the distance with the gentle lights of dear Italy, the wind beating ever softer, ever warmer out of the darkness into the open windows. And just before evening of the following, perfectly summery day – the station at Nice, the seasonal throng on its platforms…
In the blue dusk, when right as far as Cap d’Antibes, melting away like an ashen spectre in the west, there stretched in a curved diamond chain innumerable waterside lights, he stood in just a tailcoat on the balcony of his room in a hotel on the promenade, thinking of how it was minus twenty degrees in Moscow now, and expecting there would soon be a knock on his door, and he would be handed a telegram from Heinrich. Eating in the hotel dining room under gleaming chandeliers, in a crush of tailcoats and women’s evening dresses, he again expected a boy in a blue waist-length uniform jacket and white knitted gloves to bring him deferentially at any moment a telegram on a tray; he absent-mindedly ate a thin soup with roots, drank red Bordeaux and waited; he drank coffee, smoked in the vestibule and waited again, becoming more and more agitated and surprised: what is the matter with me, since my very earliest youth I’ve not experienced anything like it! But there was still no telegram. There were glimpses of the shining lifts sliding up and down, boys ran back and forth, taking round cigarettes, cigars and evening newspapers, a string orchestra struck up from the stage – there was still no telegram, but it was already past ten o’clock, and the train from Vienna ought to bring her at twelve. After the coffee he drank five glasses of brandy and, feeling exhausted, disgusted, he took the lift to his room, looking maliciously at the boy in uniform: “Ah, what a scoundrel he’ll grow into, this sly, obsequious wretch of a boy, already corrupted through and through! And who thinks up the foolish little hats and jackets for all these wretched boys, some blue, some brown, with epaulettes and piping!”
There was no telegram in the morning either. He rang, and a young footman in tails, a handsome Italian with the eyes of a gazelle, brought him coffee: “Pas de lettres, monsieur, pas de télégrammes.”* He stood in pyjamas beside the open door onto the balcony, squinting because of the sun and the sea’s dancing golden needles, gazing at the promenade, at the dense crowd of strolling people, listening to the Italian singing that, swooning in happiness, reached him from below, from beneath the balcony, and he thought with enjoyment:
“Well, to hell with her. Everything’s clear.”
He went to Monte Carlo, spent a long time gambling, lost two hundred francs, returned, to kill time, in a cab – he was driving for almost three hours: clip-clop, clip-clop, swish! And an abrupt shot from the whip in the air… The hotel porter grinned joyously:
“Pas de télégrammes, monsieur!”
He dressed for dinner vacantly, constantly thinking one and the same thing.
“If there were suddenly a knock at the door now and she suddenly came in, hurrying, agitated, explaining on the move why she hadn’t sent a telegram, why she hadn’t arrived yesterday, I think I should die of happiness! I’d tell her that never in my life had I loved anyone in the world as much as her, that God would forgive me many things for such a love, would forgive even Nadya – take all of me, all of me, Heinrich! Yes, but Heinrich’s now having dinner with her Austrian. Oh, what a thrill it would be to give her the most brutal slap in the face and crack his head open with the bottle of champagne they’re drinking together now!”
After dinner he walked through the streets in the dense crowd, in the warm air, in the sweet stench of dirt-cheap Italian cigars, he came out onto the promenade, to the pitch blackness of the sea, gazed at the precious necklace of its black curve, disappearing sadly in the distance to the right, dropped into bars and drank continually, now brandy, now gin, whisky. On returning to the hotel, white as chalk, in a white tie, in a white waistcoat, in a top hat, he went up to the hotel porter with a pompous and offhand air, mumbling with lips growing numb:
“Pas de télégrammes?”
And the porter, pretending to notice nothing, replied with joyous alacrity:
“Pas de télégrammes, monsieur!”
He was so drunk that he fell asleep after throwing off only his top hat, overcoat and tails – he fell onto his back and at once flew giddily into bottomless darkness, bespeckled with fiery stars.
On the third day he fell sound asleep after lunch and, waking up, suddenly took a sober and firm look at all his pitiful and shameful behaviour. He ordered tea in his room and began clearing the things out of his wardrobe into suitcases, trying not to think of her any more and not to regret his senseless, spoilt trip. Just before evening he went down into the vestibule, ordered his bill to be prepared, set off at a calm pace for Thomas Cook’s and took a ticket to Moscow via Venice on the evening train: I’ll spend a day in Venice and at three o’clock in the morning, by the direct route, without any stops, home to the Loskutnaya Hotel… What’s he like, this Austrian? Going by portraits and what Heinrich said, strapping, wiry, with a gloomy and decisive look – feigned, of course – on a face bent and crooked under a wide-brimmed hat… But why think about him! And who knows what else life might bring! Tomorrow – Venice. Again the singing and guitars of street singers on the embankment below the hotel – the sharp and unconcerned voice of a dark, bare-headed woman with a shawl on her shoulders stands out, as she sings the second part to the outpourings of a short-legged tenor in a beggar’s hat, who seems like a dwarf from a height… a little old man in rags helping people into a gondola – the year before he had helped him in with a fiery-eyed Sicilian girl wearing swinging cut-glass earrings, with a yellow bunch of flowering mimosa in hair the colour of black olives… the smell of the festering water of the canal, the gondola, its inside funereally lacquered, with an indented, rapacious axe shape at the prow, the rocking of the gondola, and, standing high up in the stern, the young rower with a slender waist, belted with a red scarf, moving forwards monotonously as he leant on the long oar, with his left leg set classically back…
Evening was coming on, the pale evening sea lay calm and flat, a molten green mix with an opal gloss, above it the seagulls were straining with angry and piteous cries, sensing bad weather on the morrow, the hazily grey-blue west beyond Cap d’Antibes was murky, and in it stood the fading disc of the little sun, a blood orange. He gazed at it for a long time, crushed by an even, hopeless melancholy, then came to and set off briskly for his hotel. “Journaux étrangers!”* cried a newspaper seller running towards him, thrusting The New Age upon him as he ran. He sat down on a bench, and in the dying light of the sunset began absent-mindedly unfolding and looking through the still-fresh pages of the newspaper. And suddenly he leapt up, stunned and blinded as if by a magnesium explosion:
Vienna. 17th December. Today, in the Franzensring Restaurant, the well-known Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler* killed with a revolver shot the Russian journalist and translator of many contemporary Austrian and German novelists who worked under the pseudonym “Heinrich”.
10th November 1940