of which all the bones could be felt, but, not understanding him at all, she herself, like an experienced seductress, raised it to his lips and looked at him languorously.
“Let’s go to my cabin…”
“Let’s… It really is stuffy somehow in here, full of smoke!”
And, giving her hair a shake, she picked up her hat.
He put his arms around her in the corridor. Proudly, voluptuously, she looked at him over her shoulder. With the hatred of passion and love he almost bit her on the cheek. Over her shoulder, she Bacchically[118] presented her lips to him.
In the half-light of the cabin, with the slatted grille lowered at the window, hurrying to oblige him and make full and audacious use of all the unexpected happiness that had suddenly fallen to her lot with this handsome, strong and famous man, she at once unbuttoned and trampled on the dress that fell off her onto the floor, remaining, slim as a boy, in a light camisole, with bare shoulders and arms and white drawers, and he was agonizingly pierced by the innocence of it all.
“Shall I take everything off?” she asked in a whisper, utterly like a little girl.
“Everything, everything,” he said, growing ever more gloomy.
She submissively and quickly stepped out of all the linen she had thrown down onto the floor, and remained entirely bare, grey-lilac, with that characteristic of a woman’s body when it feels nervously cold, becomes taut and chill and gets covered in goosebumps, wearing nothing but cheap grey stockings with simple garters and cheap little black shoes, and she threw a triumphantly drunken glance at him, getting hold of her hair and taking the pins out of it. Turning cold, he watched her. In body she proved better, younger than might have been thought. Thin collarbones and ribs stood out in conformity with the thin face and slender shins. But the hips were even large. The belly, with a small, deep navel, was sunken, the prominent triangle of dark, beautiful hair beneath it corresponded with the abundance of dark hair on her head. She took the pins out, and the hair fell down thickly onto her thin back with its protruding vertebrae. She bent to pull up the slipping stockings – the small breasts with frozen, wrinkled brown nipples hung down like skinny little pears, delightful in their meagreness. And he made her experience that extreme shamelessness which so ill became her, and which for that reason so aroused him with pity, tenderness, passion… Between the slats of the grille at the window, jutting upwards at an angle, nothing could have been seen, but in rapturous horror she cast sidelong glances at them when she heard the sound of carefree voices and the footsteps of people passing along the deck right by the window, and this increased still more terribly the rapture of her depravity. Oh, how close by they were talking and walking – and it would never even have occurred to anyone what was going on a step away from them, in this white cabin!
Afterwards he laid her on the bunk like a dead woman. Gritting her teeth, she lay with closed eyes and already with mournful tranquility on her face, pale now, and utterly youthful.
Just before evening, when the steamboat moored at the place where she needed to disembark, she stood beside him, quiet, with lowered eyelashes. He kissed her cold little hand with that love which remains somewhere in the heart all one’s life, and she, without looking back, ran down the gangway into the rough crowd on the jetty.
Zoyka and Valeria
In the winter Levitsky spent all his free time at the Danilevskys’ Moscow apartment, and in the summer he started visiting them at their dacha in the pine forests along the Kazan road.
He had entered his fifth year as a student, he was twenty-four, but at the Danilevskys’ only the doctor himself referred to him as his “colleague”, while all the others called him Georges and Georgeik. By reason of solitude and susceptibility to love, he was continually becoming attached to one house of his acquaintance or another, soon becoming one of the family in it, a guest from one day to the next and even from dawn till dusk if classes permitted – and now this was what he had become at the Danilevskys’. And here not only the mistress of the house, but even the children, the very plump Zoyka and the big-eared Grishka, treated him like some distant and homeless relative. To all appearances he was very straightforward and kind, obliging and taciturn, although he would respond with great readiness to any word addressed to him.
Danilevsky’s door was opened to patients by an elderly woman in hospital dress, and they entered into a spacious hallway with rugs spread on the floor, furnished with heavy, old furniture, and the woman would put on spectacles, with pencil in hand would look sternly at her diary, and to some she would appoint a day and hour of a future surgery, while others she would lead through the high doors of the waiting room, and there they would wait a long time for a summons into the surgery next door, to a young assistant in a sugar-white coat for questioning and examination – and only after that would they get to Danilevsky himself, to his large surgery with a high bed by the rear wall, onto which he would force some of them to climb and lie down, in what fear turned into the most pitiful and awkward pose: everything troubled the patients – not only the assistant and the woman in the hallway, where, gleaming, the brass disk of the pendulum in the old long-case clock went from side to side with deathly slowness, but also all the grand order of this rich, spacious apartment, that temporizing silence of the waiting room, where nobody dared even sigh more than was necessary, and they all thought that this was some sort of utterly special, eternally lifeless apartment, and that Danilevsky himself, tall, thick-set, rather rude, was unlikely to smile even once a year. But they were mistaken: that residential part of the apartment, into which led double doors to the right from the hallway, was almost always noisy with guests, the samovar never left the table in the dining room, the housemaid ran around, adding to the table now cups and glasses, now little bowls of jam, now rusks and bread rolls, and even in surgery hours Danilevsky not infrequently ran over there on tiptoe through the hallway, and while the patients waited for him, thinking he was terribly busy with someone seriously ill, he sat, drank tea and talked about them to the guests: “Let ’em[119] wait a bit, damn ’em!” One day, sitting like that and grinning, throwing glances at Levitsky, at his wiry thinness and the certain stoop of his body, at his slightly bowed legs and sunken stomach, at his freckled face, covered with fine skin, his hawkish eyes and ginger, tightly curling hair, Danilevsky said:
“Own up now, colleague: there is some Eastern blood in you, isn’t there – Yiddish, for example, or Caucasian?”
Levitsky replied with his invariable readiness to give answers:
“Not at all, Nikolai Grigoryevich, there’s no Yiddish. There is Polish, there is, maybe, your own Ukrainian blood – after all, there are Ukrainian Levitskys too – and I heard from Granddad that there’s apparently Turkish too, but whether that’s true, Allah alone knows.”
And Danilevsky burst out laughing with pleasure:
“There you are, I guessed right after all! So be careful, ladies and girls, he’s a Turk, and not at all as modest as you think. And as you know, he falls in love in the Turkish way too. Whose turn is it now, colleague? Who now is the lady of your true heart?”
“Darya Tadiyevna,” Levitsky replied with a simple-hearted smile, quickly flooding with delicate fire – he often blushed and smiled like that.
Charmingly embarrassed too, so that even her currants of eyes seemed to disappear somewhere for an instant, was Darya Tadiyevna, nice-looking, with bluish down on her upper lip and along her cheeks, wearing a black silk bonnet after a bout of typhus, half-lying in an armchair.
“Well, it’s no secret for anyone, and perfectly understandable,” she said, “after all, there’s Eastern blood in me too…”
And
Bacchically – вакхически
’em = them
