Ivan Bunin - Dark Avenues / Темные аллеи. Книга для чтения на английском языке

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] ’em = them 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 Grisha began yelling voluptuously: “Ah, hooked, you’re hooked! [120] Ah, hooked, you’re hooked! – А, попались, попались! ” while Zoyka ran out into the next room and, cross-eyed, fell backwards on the run against the end of a couch.

In the winter Levitsky had, indeed, been secretly in love with Darya Tadiyevna, and before her had experienced certain feelings for Zoyka too. She was only fourteen, but she was already very developed physically, especially at the back, although her bare, blue-grey knees under a short Scottish skirt were still childishly delicate and rounded. A year before she had been removed from grammar school, and she had not been taught at home either – Danilevsky had found the beginnings of some brain disease in her – and she lived in carefree idleness, never getting bored. She was so affectionate with everyone that she even made them smack their lips. She was steep-browed, she had a naively joyous look in her unctuous blue eyes, as though she was always surprised at something, and always moist lips. For all the plumpness of her body, there was a graceful coquetry of movement about it. A red ribbon tied in her hair with its tints of walnut made her particularly seductive. She used to sit down freely on Levitsky’s knees – as though innocently, childishly – and probably sensed what he was secretly experiencing, holding her plumpness, softness and weight and trying to keep his eyes off her bare knees under the little tartan skirt. Sometimes he could not contain himself, and he would kiss her on the cheek as if in jest, and she would close her eyes with a languorous and mocking smile. She had once whispered to him in strict confidence what she alone in all the world knew about her mother: her mother was in love with young Dr Titov! Her mother was forty, but after all, she was as slim as a girl, and terribly young-looking, and the two of them, both her mother and the doctor, were so good-looking and tall! Later Levitsky had become inattentive to her – Darya Tadiyevna had begun appearing in the house. Zoyka seemed to become even merrier, more carefree, but never took her eyes off either her or Levitsky; she would often fling herself with a cry to kiss her, but so hated her that when Darya fell ill with typhus, she awaited daily the joyous news from the hospital of her death. And then she awaited her departure – and the summer, when Levitsky, freed from classes, would begin visiting them at the dacha along the Kazan road where the Danilevskys were living in the summer for the third year now: in a certain way she was surreptitiously hunting him down.

And so the summer arrived, and he began coming every week for two or three days. But then soon Valeria Ostrogradskaya came to stay, her father’s niece from Kharkov, whom neither Zoyka nor Grishka had ever seen before. Levitsky was sent to Moscow early in the morning to meet her at the Kursk Station, and he arrived from their station not on a bicycle, but sitting with her in the station cabman’s chaise, tired, with sunken eyes, joyously excited. It was evident that he had fallen in love with her while still at the Kursk Station, and she was already treating him imperiously as he pulled her things out of the chaise. However, running up onto the porch to meet Zoyka’s mother, she immediately forgot about him, and then did not notice him all day long. She seemed incomprehensible to Zoyka – sorting out her things in her room and afterwards sitting on the balcony at lunch, she would at times talk a very great deal, then unexpectedly fall silent, thinking her own thoughts. But she was a genuine Little Russian beauty! And Zoyka pestered her with unflagging persistence:

“And have you brought morocco ankle boots with you, and a woolen shawl to wear around your waist? Will you put them on? Will you let people call you Valyechka?”

But even without the Little Russian costume she was very good-looking: strong, well-formed, with thick, dark hair, velvety eyebrows which almost met, stern eyes the colour of black blood, a hot, dark flush on her tanned face, a bright gleam of teeth and full, cherry-red lips, above which she too had a barely visible little moustache, only not down, like Darya Tadiyevna had, but pretty little black hairs, just like the ones between her eyebrows. Her hands were small but also strong and evenly tanned, as if lightly smoked. And what shoulders! And on them, how transparent were the pink silk ribbons holding the camisole beneath her fine white blouse! Her skirt was quite short, perfectly simple, but it fitted her amazingly well. Zoyka was so enraptured that she was not even jealous over Levitsky, who stopped going away to Moscow and did not leave Valeria’s side, happy that she had let him close to her, had also started calling him Georges, and was forever ordering him to do things. Thereafter the days became perfectly summery and hot, guests came more and more frequently from Moscow, and Zoyka noticed that Levitsky had been dismissed, and was sitting beside her mother more and more, helping her to prepare raspberries, and that Valeria had fallen in love with Dr Titov, with whom her mother was secretly in love. In general, something had happened to Valeria – when there were no guests, she stopped changing her smart blouses, as she had done before; she would sometimes go around from morning till evening in Zoyka’s mother’s peignoir, and she had a fastidious air. It was terribly intriguing: had she kissed Levitsky before falling in love with Dr Titov or not? Grishka swore he had seen her once before dinner walking with Levitsky down the avenue of fir trees after bathing, wrapped up in a towel like a turban, and how Levitsky, stumbling, had been dragging her wet sheet along, and saying something very, very rapidly, and how she had paused, and he had suddenly caught her by the shoulder and kissed her on the lips: