Dark Avenues / Темные аллеи. Книга для чтения на английском языке. Иван Бунин

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menacing?”

      “Because it’s mysterious, when only the chanticleer, the cockerel, as we call it, and the night crow, the owl, can stay awake. Then the Lord Himself listens to the earth, the most important stars begin to twinkle, the ice holes freeze in seas and rivers.”

      “And why is it you yourself don’t sleep at night?”

      “I sleep as much as is needed as well, sir. Is an old person meant to have a lot of sleep? Like a bird on a branch.”

      “Well, go to bed, only finish telling me about that wolf.”

      “But you know, it’s a dark business, long ago, sir – perhaps a ballad.”

      “What’s that you said?”

      “A ballad, sir. That’s what all our masters used to say, they liked reading those ballads. Sometimes I’d be listening and there’d be a tingling on my head:

      Howls the cold wind o’er the mountain,

      Whirls in white the pasture,

      Comes foul weather and the blizzard,

      Buried deep’s the highway[28]

      “How beautiful, Lord!”

      “What’s beautiful about it, Mashenka?”

      “What’s beautiful about it, sir, is you don’t know what it is that’s beautiful. It’s scary.”

      “In the old days, Mashenka, everything was scary.”

      “How can I put it, sir? Perhaps it’s true that it was scary, but it all seems dear to me now. I mean, when was it? Just so long ago – all the kingdoms have gone, all the oaks have crumbled from old age, all the graves are level with the earth. Now this story too – among the menials it used to be told word for word, but is it the truth? The story was supposed to have happened still in the time of the great Tsarina,[29] and the reason why the prince was sitting in Krutiye Gory was supposed to be that she’d grown angry with him over something, had shut him up a long way away from her, and he’d become really fierce – most of all in the punishment of his serfs and in fornication. He was still very much in his prime, and as for his appearance, wonderfully handsome, and both among his menials and throughout his villages there wasn’t supposed to be a single girl he hadn’t demanded come to him, to his seraglio, for her wedding night. So he went and fell into the most terrible sin: he was even tempted by his own son’s new bride. The son was in St Petersburg in the military service of the Tsarina, and when he’d found himself his intended, he got permission for the marriage from his father and married, and so then he came with his new bride to pay his respects to him, to that there Krutiye Gory. And the father goes and falls for her[30]. Not for nothing[31], sir, is it sung about love:

      Love’s fires rage in ev’ry kingdom,

      People love all round the globe…[32]

      And however can it be a sin, when even an old man’s thinking about his beloved, sighing over her? But here, after all, it was a completely different matter, here it was like it was his own daughter, and he’d stretched his grasping intentions to fornication.”

      “And so what happened?”

      “Well, sir, the young prince, remarking this parental design, decided to flee in secret. He put the stablemen up to it, gave them all sorts of presents, ordered them to harness up a good quick troika for midnight, stole out from his own family home as soon as the old prince had fallen asleep, led out his young wife – and he was off. Only the old prince wasn’t even thinking of sleeping: he’d already found everything out that evening from his informers and straight away gave chase. Night-time, an unspeakable frost, so there’s even rings lying round the moon, snows in the steppe deeper than the height of a man, but it’s all nothing to him: he flies along on his steed, sabres and pistols hanging all over him, beside his favourite whipper-in, and already he can see the troika with his son up ahead. He cries out like an eagle: stop, or I’ll shoot! But they don’t pay any heed[33] there, they drive the troika on at full blazing speed. Then the old prince began shooting at the horses, and killed as he rode first the one outrunner, the right-hand one, as it ran, then the other, the left-hand one, and already he meant to lay low the shaft horse, but he glanced to the side and sees rushing at him across the snow, beneath the moon, a great, fantastic wolf with eyes red like fire and with an aureole around its head! The prince set about firing at it too, but it didn’t even bat an eyelid[34]: rushed at the prince like a whirlwind, jumped onto his chest – and in a single instant slashed through his Adam’s apple[35] with its fang.”

      “Ah, what horrors, Mashenka,” I said. “Truly, a ballad!”

      “It’s a sin to mock, sir,” she replied. “God’s world is full of wonders.”

      “I don’t disagree, Mashenka. Only it’s strange, nonetheless, that this wolf has been painted right beside the tomb of the prince it slaughtered.”

      “It was painted, sir, as the prince himself wished; he was brought home still alive, and he had the time before dying to make his confession and take communion[36], and in his final moment he ordered that wolf to be painted in the church above his tomb – as a lesson, then, for all the prince’s descendants. Who could possibly have disobeyed him in those days? And the church was his domestic one too, built by him himself.”

3rd February 1938

      Styopa

      Just before evening on the road to Chern the young merchant Krasilschikov was caught by a thunderstorm and torrential rain. In a knee-length jacket with raised collar and a peaked cap pulled well down with streams running off it, he was riding quickly in a racing droshky[37], sitting astride right up against the dashboard[38] with his feet in high boots pressed hard against the front axle, jerking with wet, frozen hands on the wet, slippery, leather reins, hurrying along a horse that was full of life anyway; to his left, beside the front wheel, which spun in a whole fountain of liquid mud, a brown pointer ran steadily with his long tongue hanging out.

      At first Krasilschikov drove along the black-earth track beside the highway, then, when it turned into an unbroken grey, bubbling torrent, he turned onto the highway and began crunching over its little broken stones. Neither the surrounding fields nor the sky had been visible for a long time now through this flood, which smelt of the freshness of cucumbers and of phosphorus; before his eyes, like a sign of the end of the world, in blinding ruby fire, a sharp, nakedly branching flash of lightning kept searing sinuously down from above across a great wall of clouds, and with a crack above his head there would fly the sizzling tail, which then exploded in thunderclaps, extraordinary in their shattering power. Each time the horse would jerk its whole body forwards, pressing back its ears, and the dog was already at a gallop… Krasilschikov had grown up and studied in Moscow, had graduated from university there, but in the summer, when he came to his Tula estate, which resembled a rich dacha, he liked to feel himself a landowning merchant of peasant origin, he drank Lafitte[39] and smoked from a gold cigarette case, yet wore blacked boots[40],

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