2

I saw Natalie for the first time the next morning only in passing: she suddenly slipped into the dining room from the hall, took a look – she had not yet done her hair and was wearing just a light dressing gown made of something orange – and, with a flash of that orange colour, the golden brightness of her hair and her black eyes, she vanished. At that moment I was alone in the dining room, I had just finished having coffee – the uhlan had finished earlier and left – and, having got up from the table, had by chance turned around…

I had woken up that morning quite early, in the still-complete silence of the entire house. There were so many rooms in the house that I sometimes got them mixed up. I woke up in some remote room looking out onto a shady part of the garden, having had a good night’s sleep; I washed with pleasure, dressed entirely in clean clothes – it was particularly pleasant to put on a new, red silk kosovorotka – made my wet black hair, cut the day before in Voronezh, look as nice as I could, went out into the corridor, turned into another one, and found myself in front of the door into the study, which at the same time was the uhlan’s bedroom. Knowing he got up at about five o’clock in the summer, I knocked. No one replied, and I opened the door, glanced in, and satisfied myself with pleasure of the immutability of that old spacious room with a triple Italian window in imitation of hundred-year-old silver poplar: on the left was an entire wall of oak bookcases; in one spot between them there towered a mahogany clock with the brass disc of a motionless pendulum, in another there stood a whole heap of pipes with bead-decorated stems, and above them there hung a barometer; tucked into a third spot was a bureau from our grandfathers’ times with the reddened green cloth of the lowered walnut top, and on the cloth there were pincers, hammers, nails and a brass spyglass; on the wall beside the door above a two-ton wooden couch was a whole gallery of faded portraits in oval frames; beneath the window were a writing desk and a deep armchair – the one and the other also of huge size; further to the right, above an extremely wide oak bed, was a picture covering the entire wall – a blackened, varnished background, puffs of swarthily smoke-coloured clouds and poetic greenish-blue trees scarcely visible against it, and in the foreground there shines, as if with petrified egg white, a plump, naked beauty, almost life-size, standing with her proud face half-turned towards the viewer, with all the bulges of her weighty spine, steep backside and the backs of her mighty legs, seductively concealing the nipple of a breast with the extended and splayed fingers of one hand, and the bottom of her belly, covered in creases of fat, with the other. Having looked it all over, I heard behind me the strong voice of the uhlan, approaching me with his crutch from the hallway:

“No, brother, you won’t find me in the bedroom at this time. It’s you, isn’t it, that lies about in bed till three oaks.”

I kissed his broad, wiry hand and asked:

“What oaks, uncle?”

“It’s what the peasants say,” he replied, shaking his grey quiff and looking me over with yellow eyes that were still penetrating and intelligent. “The sun’s risen three oaks high, and you’ve still got your mug in the pillow, say the peasants. Well, let’s go and have some coffee…”

“A wonderful old man, a wonderful house,” I thought, following him into the dining room, into which, through the open windows, gazed the greenery of the morning garden and all the summer well-being of a rural estate. The old nanny, small and hunchbacked, waited at table; the uhlan drank strong tea with cream from a thick glass in a silver glass-holder, using a broad finger to hold the long, thin, twisted stem of an ancient, round, gold teaspoon in the glass, while I ate slice after slice of black bread and butter and kept on pouring myself refills from a hot, silver coffee pot; interested only in himself, the uhlan, without asking me about anything, talked about the neighbouring landowners, abusing and mocking them in every possible way, and I pretended I was listening, gazing at his moustache, his sideburns and the sizeable hairs on the end of his nose, while actually waiting so impatiently for Natalie and Sonya that I could not sit still: what is this Natalie like, and how will Sonya and I meet after what happened yesterday? I felt rapture and gratitude towards her, and thought wantonly of her and Natalie’s bedrooms, about everything that is done in a woman’s bedroom in the disorder of the morning… Maybe Sonya had after all told Natalie something of this love of ours that had started the day before? If so, then I felt something like love for Natalie, and not because she was supposed to be a beauty, but because she had already become Sonya’s secret accomplice and mine – why should I not love the two of them? At any time now they would come in in all their morning freshness, they would see me, my Georgian good looks and red kosovorotka, they would start to talk, start to laugh, would sit down at the table, pouring prettily from this hot coffee pot – the young, morning appetite, young, morning excitement, the brilliance of eyes after a good sleep, a light coating of powder on cheeks that seemed to have grown younger still after sleep, and that laughter after every word, not entirely natural, and so all the more charming… And before lunch they would go through the garden to the river, would undress in the bathing hut, their naked bodies lit up from above by the blueness of the sky, and from below by the reflection of the transparent water… My imagination had always been vivid, and mentally I could see how Sonya and Natalie, holding onto the handrail of the ladder in the bathing hut, would awkwardly begin going down its steps, immersed in the water, wet, cold and slippery from the disgusting green velvet of the slime that had formed on them, how Sonya, throwing back her head of thick hair, would suddenly fall decisively onto the water, her raised breasts first – and, with the whole of her bluish, chalky body strangely visible in the water, would spread the crooked angles of her arms and legs in different directions, just like a frog…

“Well, until dinner time – you remember, don’t you: dinner at twelve,” said the uhlan, shaking his head negatively, and he stood up with his clean-shaven chin, with his brown moustache joined to similar sideburns, tall, agedly firm, in a roomy tussore suit and blunt-toed shoes, with a crutch in his broad hand which was covered in buckwheat, and he patted me on the shoulder and left at a rapid pace. And it was at this point, when I also got up to go out through the next room onto the balcony, that she slipped in, appeared fleetingly, and vanished, immediately striking me with joyous delight. I went out onto the balcony amazed – a beauty indeed! – and I stood there for a long time, as though gathering my thoughts. I had been waiting so impatiently for them to come to the dining room, but when I finally heard them in the dining room from the balcony, I suddenly ran down into the garden – I was seized by a sort of terror, perhaps before the two of them, with one of whom I already had a captivating secret, perhaps most of all before Natalie, before that instantaneousness with which she had dazzled me in her quickness half an hour before. I walked about for a while in the garden, which lay, like the whole estate, on low land by the river, and, finally overcoming myself, went in with assumed ingenuousness and met Sonya’s cheerful boldness and a sweet joke from Natalie, who, with a smile, threw up at me from her black lashes the radiant blackness of her eyes, which was particularly striking with the colour of her hair:

“We’ve already seen one another!”

Then we stood on the balcony, leaning on the stone balustrade, sensing with the pleasure of summer how hot the sun was on our bare heads, and Natalie stood beside me, while Sonya, with her arm around Natalie and as though absent-mindedly gazing at something, kept singing with a grin: “Amidst a noisy ball, by chance…”* Then she straightened up:

“Well, now to bathing! Us first of all, then it’ll be your turn…”

Natalie ran off for sheets, while Sonya delayed and whispered to me:

“From today, be so good as to pretend that you’ve fallen in love with Natalie. And beware, if it should turn out that you don’t need to pretend.”

And I almost replied with cheerful impudence that no, I didn’t need to now, but, looking sidelong at the door, she added quietly:

“I’ll come to you after dinner…”

When they returned, I went to the bathing place – first by a long avenue of silver birches, then amidst various old riverside trees, where there was a warm smell of river water and rooks were yelling in the treetops; I walked and again thought with two diametrically opposed feelings about Natalie and about Sonya, and about how I would be bathing in the same water in which they had just been bathing…

After dinner in the midst of all those happy, aimless, free and tranquil things that gazed through the open windows from the garden – the sky, the greenery, the sun – after a long dinner with cold summer soup, fried chickens and raspberries and cream, during which I was secretly dying from the presence of Natalie and from anticipation of the hour when the whole house would grow quiet for the period after dinner, and Sonya (who had come out to dinner with a dark-red velvety rose in her hair) would come running to me surreptitiously to continue what there had been the day before, but this time not hastily and any old how – after dinner I immediately went off to my room and, setting the slatted shutters ajar, began waiting for her, lying on the Turkish couch, listening to the hot quietness of the estate and the already languid afternoon singing of the birds in the garden, from which through the shutters came air sweet with flowers and grasses, and I wondered desperately: how on earth am I now to live in this duality – in secret rendezvous with Sonya and next to Natalie, just one thought of whom already enveloped me in such pure amorous delight and in a passionate longing to gaze at her with nothing but that joyous adoration with which, a little while before, I had gazed at her slender, inclined figure, and the sharp, girlish elbows on which, half-standing, she had leant on the sun-warmed old stone of the balustrade? Sonya, leaning alongside her and with an arm around her shoulder, had been in her frilled cambric peignoir like a young woman who had just got married, while she, in a gingham skirt and embroidered Little Russian blouse, beneath which could be divined all the youthful perfection of her figure, had seemed almost an adolescent. And that was where the supreme joy lay, that I did not even dare think of the possibility of kissing her with the same feelings with which I had the day before kissed Sonya! In the light and wide sleeve of the blouse, embroidered across the shoulders in red and blue, could be seen her slender arm, against the drily golden skin of which lay little gingery hairs – I had gazed and thought: what would I experience if I dared touch them with my lips! And, sensing my gaze, she had thrown up towards me the brilliant blackness of her eyes and the whole of her bright little head, encircled with the lash of quite a large plait. I had walked away and hurriedly lowered my eyes, having seen her legs through the hem of her skirt, which was translucent in the sun, and her slender, strong, thoroughbred ankles in grey transparent stockings…

Sonya, with the rose in her hair, opened and closed the door quickly, and quietly exclaimed: “What, you were asleep!” I leapt up – not at all, not at all, could I have been asleep! – and seized her hands. “Lock the door…” I rushed to the door, and she sat down on the couch, closing her eyes – “well, come here to me” – and we immediately lost all shame and reason. We scarcely uttered a word in those minutes, and she, in all the loveliness of her hot body, now allowed me to kiss her everywhere – but only to kiss her – and she closed her eyes ever more duskily and grew ever more flushed in the face. And again, when leaving and adjusting her hair, she warned in a whisper:

“And as regards Natalie, I repeat: beware of passing beyond pretence. My character’s not at all as sweet as you might think!”

The rose was lying on the floor. I put it away in the desk, and by evening its dark-red velvet had become limp and lilac.