Well i, gentlemen, fell in love for the first time, or, to be more accurate, lost my innocence, at about twelve. I was at grammar school then, and was travelling home from town into the country for the Christmas holidays, on one of those warm grey days that so often occur at Christmas-tide. The train was moving through pine forests under deep snow, I was childishly happy and calm, sensing this gentle winter’s day, this snow and these pines, dreaming of the skis awaiting me at home, and I was sitting entirely on my own in the over-heated first-class part of an old-style mixed carriage comprised of just two sections, that is, of four red velvet couches with high backs – it was as if that velvet made it even hotter and stuffier – and four small couches of that same velvet beside the windows on the other side, with an aisle between them and the big ones. I spent more than an hour there, carefree, peaceful and alone. But at the second station from the town the door from the carriage entrance opened, there was a sudden pleasing smell of wintry air, and in came a porter with two suitcases in covers and a holdall of tartan material; behind him was a very pale, black-eyed young lady in a black satin bonnet and an astrakhan fur coat, and behind the lady a strapping gentleman with yellow, owlish eyes wearing a deerskin hat with the earflaps raised, felt boots to above the knees and a brilliant deerskin coat. I, of course, as a well-brought-up boy, immediately rose and moved from the big couch beside the door to the carriage entrance into the second section, but not onto another big couch, rather onto a small one beside a window, facing the first section, so as to have the opportunity to observe the newcomers – after all, children are just as attentively curious about new people as a dog is about unfamiliar dogs. And it was there, on that couch, that my innocence perished. When the porter had put the things onto the rack above the couch on which I had just been sitting, had said to the gentleman, who had thrust a paper rouble into his hand: “Safe journey, Your Highness!” and, with the train already moving, had run out of the carriage, the lady immediately lay down on her back on the couch under the rack with the back of her head on its velvet bolster, and the gentleman, awkwardly, with hands unaccustomed to any work, pulled the holdall down from the rack onto the couch opposite, tugged a little white pillow out of it and, without looking, handed it to her. She said quietly: “Thank you, my dear,” and, pushing it under her head, closed her eyes, while he, after throwing his coat off onto the holdall, stood by the window between the small couches of his section and lit up a fat cigarette, diffusing its aromatic smell densely in the stuffy heat of the carriage. He stood at his full, powerful height, with the earflaps of his deerskin hat sticking up and, it seemed, with his eyes fixed on the pines racing backwards, while I at first kept my eyes fixed on him and felt only one thing: terrible hatred towards him for his having completely failed to notice my presence, his not once having even glanced at me, as though I hadn’t been in the carriage at all – and, on the strength of that, for everything else as well: for his lordly calm, for his princely peasant’s size, predatory round eyes, carelessly neglected chestnut moustache and beard, and even for his heavyweight and roomy brown suit, for his light, velvety felt boots, pulled up above the knees. But not even a minute had passed before I’d already forgotten about him: I suddenly remembered that deathly but beautiful pallor by which I’d been unconsciously struck at the entrance of the lady who was now lying on her back on the couch opposite me, I transferred my gaze to her, and no longer saw anything else besides her, her face and body until the next station, where I needed to get off. She sighed and lay more comfortably, a little lower down; without opening her eyes she flung open her fur coat, worn over a flannel dress; using her feet, she kicked her warm overshoes off her open suede shoes and onto the floor; she removed the silk bonnet from her head and dropped it down beside her – her black hair proved, to my great surprise, to be cut short like a boy’s – then on the right and on the left she unhooked something from her grey silk stockings, raising her dress as far as the bare flesh between it and the stockings, and, adjusting the hem, dozed off: her heliotropic, femininely young lips with dark down above them opened a little, her face, pale to the point of transparent whiteness and with the black eyebrows and lashes very prominent upon it, lost all expression… The sleep of a woman you desire, who draws your whole being to her – you know what that is like! And so for the first time in my life I saw and felt it – until then I’d seen only the sleep of my sister, my mother – and I kept on looking, looking with unmoving eyes and a dry mouth at that boyishly feminine black head, at the motionless face, on the pure whiteness of which the fine black eyebrows and closed black lashes stood out so wonderfully, at the dark down above the parted lips, utterly agonizing in their attractiveness. I was already absorbing and coming to comprehend all there is that is indescribable in the recumbent female body, in the fullness of the hips and the slenderness of the ankles, and with terrifying vividness could still see in my mind that incomparable, delicate, feminine flesh colour which she had accidentally shown me while unhooking something from the stockings underneath her flannel dress. When the jolt of the train stopping in front of our station unexpectedly brought me round, I went staggering out of the carriage into the sweet wintry air. Beyond the wooden station building stood a troika sledge with a pair of greys in harness, their bells jangling, and waiting beside the sledge with a raccoon fur coat in his hands was our old coachman, who said to me in an unfriendly fashion:
“‘Your Mummy said you must be sure to put it on…’
“And I obediently slipped into that coat of my grandfather’s, smelling of fur and wintry freshness, with its huge, already yellow and long-haired collar, I sank into the soft and spacious sledge and, to the muffled, hollow muttering of the bells, began rocking down the deep and soundless road of snow in a cutting through the pines, closing my eyes and still overcome by what I had just experienced, thinking confused and sadly sweet thoughts about that alone – and not about all the nice things from before that awaited me at home along with the skis and the wolf cub, taken in the den of a she-wolf killed during a hunt in August, and now sitting in a pit in our garden, which even in the autumn, when I’d been home for two days for the Intercession, had already given off such a weird and wonderful stench of wild animal.”
23rd October 1943