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The Elagin Affair And Other Stories By Ivan Bunin Ivan R. Dee Copyright © 2005 Ivan R. Dee, Inc.
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-1-56663-641-4 Chapter One Mitya's Love
THE NINTH of March was Mitya's last happy day in Moscow. So it seemed, at least, to him.
Katya and he were walking on Tverskoy Boulevard. Winter had suddenly given way to spring, and it was almost hot in the sun. One could almost believe the larks had returned, bringing warmth and joy. Everything was melting, glistening, wet. Water dripped from all the eaves while yardmen hacked ice from the sidewalks and flung damp, sticky snow from the roofs. All the streets were crowded and alive. The high clouds had dispersed, transformed into a delicate white smoke that drifted in the sky's damp blue. In the distance Pushkin's statue rose, pensive and benevolent; the domes of the Strastnoy Monastery gleamed in the sun. The fact that Katya was so winsome, so engaging-this was best of all that day: everything she did expressed a kind of easy, natural intimacy. Repeatedly she took his arm and peered up at him with childlike trust, studied the happy, slightly condescending look on Mitya's face as he continued walking, taking such long strides that she struggled to keep up.
"You're so funny," she said unexpectedly when they were near the Pushkin monument. "When you laugh with that big mouth of yours, there's a kind of awkward, almost boyish way you stretch your lips. It's terribly endearing.... Don't be hurt-I love you forthat smile! ... that smile and your Byzantine eyes...."
Mitya tried not to smile as he overcame a feeling of both secret satisfaction and slightly wounded pride. "When it comes to looking like children," he answered amicably, looking at the statue that now towered above them, "I think it's safe to say that you and I haven't grown very far apart. And I resemble a Byzantine about as much as you look like the empress of China. It's just that you're all crazy about these so-called Byzantines, these children of the Renaissance. I really don't understand your mother!"
"What would you do in her place-lock me up in a tower?" Katya asked.
"Not a tower, no. But all of these supposedly artistic Bohemians, all of these future stars from studios and conservatories-I wouldn't let any of them through your door," Mitya said, trying to stay calm and keep a friendly, casual tone. "You told me yourself that Bukovetsky already asked you to dinner at the Strelna, and Yegorov asked to sculpt you naked in the form of some kind of dying sea-wave-an honor, of course, that you find terribly flattering."
"I won't turn away from art. Even for you, I won't do it," said Katya. "Maybe I am depraved, the way you often say I am," she continued, although Mitya had never said this. "Maybe I am ruined. But you'll have to take me as I am. I don't want to argue anymore. Stop being jealous over me-at least for now, on such a wonderful day.... How can you not understand that you-regardless of all else-you alone are best of all," she said with soft insistence as she looked into his eyes, her expression now deliberately composed to be alluring. "A drowsing secret lies between us," she recited, drawing out the words as if deep in thought. "A soul gave a soul a ring."
These last words, this verse, hurt Mitya deeply. In general, much was painful and unpleasant-even on that day. The joke about boyish awkwardness was unpleasant. He'd heard many such comments from Katya before, and they were far from accidental: she quite often revealed herself to be more adult than he in certain aspects of their intimacy, and quite often-unwittingly, which is to say completely naturally-she brandished this superiority above him while Mitya took it as a painful sign of her secret and depraved experiences. The phrase "regardless of all else" (regardless of all else, you alone are best of all) was unpleasant too, as was the fact that she suddenly lowered her voice to speak these words. And more than anything, that poem, its mannered reading-this was particularly unpleasant. But later, when he looked back at the ninth of March, it would seem that on that last happy day in Moscow he'd endured quite easily both the poem and its reading, despite the fact that this, most of all, reminded him of that artistic set that was robbing him of Katya and therefore sharply stirred his jealousy and his hatred.
Returning from Kuznetsky Most that day, they stopped at Zimmerman's so that Katya could buy several works by Scriabin, and there, in passing, she began to speak of Mitya's mother. "You can't imagine how afraid I am of her, even now, long before we meet," she said, laughing.
Throughout their affair, for some reason they'd never touched on the question of the future-had never asked where all of this would lead. And now, suddenly, Katya began to talk about his mother, began to talk as if there couldn't be the slightest doubt that they would join as one family.
II
After that day, nothing seemed to change: it all continued just as before. Mitya accompanied Katya to the actors' studio at the Moscow Art Theatre, to concerts, and to literary evenings; sometimes he visited her at home in Kislovka until two in the morning, taking advantage of the strange freedom granted her by her mother, a kind, appealing woman with bright red hair who never stopped smoking and always wore rouge. She had long ago separated from her husband, who now had a second family. Katya also stopped to visit Mitya in his student's rooms on Molchanovka, and these meetings almost always passed in the deep, narcotic haze of their kisses. But Mitya had a gnawing sense that something terrible had been set in motion, that some change had taken place-and now was taking hold of Katya.
It had passed quickly-that easy, carefree time when they'd just met, when they'd barely grown acquainted, and suddenly both felt that nothing could be better than to sit alone and talk (sometimes from morning until night), and Mitya found himself inside that made-up world of love that he'd been waiting for since his childhood and adolescence. It was December-frost and clear skies, each day decorating Moscow with heavy rime and the dim, red disk of the low sun. January and February seemed to spin Mitya's love in a whirlwind of happiness and small joys that had either come to life already or now, right now, would burst into the world. But even then, something had begun to cloud that happiness, to poison it-and this would be the case more and more often. Even then it often seemed as if two Katyas existed: one for whom he'd felt a stubborn and insistent need from the first minutes of their acquaintance, and another who was real, pedestrian, and painfully impossible to reconcile with the first. And still, what Mitya went through then was nothing like his current state.
It could all be explained. Spring had begun with all its feminine concerns, its purchases and orders, its endless alterations. Katya often had to go with her mother to the tailor's, and soon her exams would begin at the private drama school where she studied. Her preoccupied, distracted state of mind was therefore only natural. Mitya tried repeatedly to comfort himself with these thoughts, but they were little help; the utterances of his suspicious heart-its refutations of those equitable thoughts-were far more powerful than reason, and everywhere his doubts were confirmed with growing patency. Katya's inner disregard for him grew steadily, and with it rose his jealousy, his grim suspicions. The director of her school filled Katya's head with praise, and she couldn't keep from sharing this with Mitya. The director had told her, "You, my darling"-he called all his pupils "darling"-"are the pride of my school," and then, in addition to his regular classes, he began to work with her individually during the spring fast so that she could pass her final exams with particular distinction and add to his renown. It was a well-known fact that he debauched his students, taking one of them every summer to Finland, the Caucasus, or abroad. And now it entered Mitya's head that the director had his sights on Katya. Of course she was not to blame for this, but Katya likely felt and understood the director's intentions and thus already shared a secret, foul relationship with him. This idea tortured Mitya more and more as the apathy that Katya felt for him became too obvious to deny.
In general something seemed to be distracting her from Mitya. He couldn't think calmly about the director. But he was not the only problem! Something larger-some new set of interests now seemed to dominate her love. What was it? Who was it? Mitya didn't know, and thus he was jealous of everyone and everything, fearing above all else some secret life that he imagined she'd begun to lead without him, and which, he was convinced, she kept from him deliberately. It seemed that she was being pulled inexorably away from him-drawn, perhaps, to something he found too terrible to contemplate.
Once, when her mother was present, Katya said to him half jokingly, "You, in general, Mitya, think of women in keeping with the Domostroy. You'll become an absolute Othello! I wouldn't want to fall in love and marry you!"
"I can't imagine love without jealousy," her mother countered. "He who feels no jealousy, I think, also feels no love."
"No, mama," said Katya, with her habit of repeating other people's words. "Jealousy is disrespect for the person whom you love. ... You could say, 'If I'm not trusted, then I'm not loved,'" she added, deliberately not looking toward Mitya.
"I'd say just the opposite," her mother responded. "In my opinion, jealousy is love. I even read about it somewhere-an article that proved this point very well. It even used examples from the Bible, showing God himself is jealous, vengeful...."
As for Mitya's love, it now expressed itself almost entirely in jealousy alone. And Mitya believed it wasn't ordinary jealousy but some particular strain. Although he and Katya had not yet breached the final bounds of intimacy, they allowed themselves too much during those hours spent alone, and Katya at times grew even more passionate than she'd been before. And now this stirred suspicions, roused in him a horror. All the feelings that comprised his jealousy were terrible, but one among them was most terrible of all-and Mitya couldn't sort it from the rest, couldn't see it clearly, couldn't understand. It was rooted in those passionate displays: when he and Katya shared them, they were pure and sweet, blissful, almost divine. But when Mitya thought of Katya and another man, those same displays seemed foul beyond all words, seemed to violate the laws of nature. At those moments Katya aroused in him a sharp hatred. Everything he allowed himself with her was steeped in virtue and celestial pleasure, but the moment he imagined another man in his place, everything changed, became utterly indecent, and stirred in him a violent urge to strangle Katya-strangle her and not his phantom rival.
III
Katya's exams were finally conducted during the sixth week of the fast. And that day seemed to validate all of Mitya's suffering, all his agonizing doubts.
She didn't see him, didn't notice him in the least that day. She was completely alien to him, completely public.
She enjoyed great success. She was dressed all in white like a bride, and her nervousness made her charming. She received warm, affectionate applause, and the director, a self-satisfied actor with sad and shameless eyes, made only occasional comments in order to inflate his own pride. He spoke quietly from his seat in the front row, but in such a way that the unbearable sound of his every word was audible throughout the hall.
"Less reading," he told her, his voice calm and grave-and so authoritative that Katya seemed to be his personal possession. "Don't act, experience. Feel," he said distinctly.
It was unendurable. That performance which elicited such warm applause was simply unendurable. Katya flushed hotly, her small voice broke, her breathing faltered-and all of this was touching and charming. But she read in a meretricious, singsong voice, the false and stupid notes of which were taken for high art in that milieu that Mitya so despised and that Katya already occupied in all her thoughts. She didn't speak. She declaimed. With a kind of languid passion, she delivered every line like some objectless entreaty, a belabored, ardent plea on behalf of nothing. Mitya didn't know how to hide his eyes in his embarrassment for her. Worst of all was the mix of angelic purity and prurience that seemed so evident in her, in her small, flushed face; in her white shoes and white dress, which seemed shorter now, as everyone was looking up at her on the stage; in the white silk stockings stretched taut across her calves. "A girl sang in the church choir...." With excessive and contrived naiveté Katya was reading about some other girl, supposedly as innocent as an angel. And listening, Mitya felt that keen sense of closeness that always comes when you see a loved one in a crowd. He felt bitter enmity. He felt proud of Katya when the thought passed through his mind that she was his, despite all else-and then he felt a tearing in his chest: "No, she isn't mine ... no more...."
There were good days again after the exam. But Mitya didn't trust them as he had before. "You're so silly," Katya said to him, remembering her performance. "Couldn't you feel it? Couldn't you tell that it was for you-just for you-that I read so well?"
But he couldn't forget what he'd felt during the exam, and he couldn't admit that those emotions hadn't left him. Katya seemed to sense his secret feelings and once shouted in the midst of an argument: "I don't understand why you love me if you find everything about me so repulsive! What do you want from me? What, really-what is it that you want?"
He himself didn't know why he loved her, but he felt that, rather than subsiding, his love was growing stronger with the incessant, jealous struggle he now fought against someone, something because of her, and this taxing love, which gathered greater strength each day, grew more and more severe in its demands.
"You love my body-only my body, and not my soul," Katya once told him bitterly. And again these were someone else's words, some bit of theatre. But trite and shallow as they were, they touched on something painfully insoluble. He didn't know what he loved her for. He couldn't say exactly what it was he wanted.... What in general does it mean to love? Answering such a question was made all the more impossible by the fact that Mitya hadn't come across a single word in everything he'd read and heard about love that could come close to offering a definition of the subject. Everything in books and life seemed bent on speaking only of an utterly discarnate love or something known as sensuality and passion. His love resembled neither. What was it that he felt for her? That abstract love, or passion? Was it Katya's body or her soul that almost made him faint, that stirred in him the bliss one feels before death as he undid the buttons on her blouse and kissed her breasts, that immaculate, exquisite flesh laid bare with a submissiveness that stunned his soul-laid bare with all the shamelessness of utter innocence?
IV
More and more she changed.
Her success on her exam explained a great deal. But there were other reasons too.
The arrival of spring seemed to transform Katya into a young woman of high society: an elegant girl in a constant hurry. Soon Mitya felt ashamed of his hallway whenever she arrived-she always came by coach instead of walking now-and hurried down its dark length with her silks rustling, her veil covering her face. She was invariably tender with him but also invariably late, and ever prone to cutting short their time together with the excuse that she had to see the tailor with her mother yet again.
"We're possessed when it comes to clothes!" she told him, her shining eyes round with happiness and surprise. She knew full well that Mitya didn't believe her, but there was nothing else to say, nothing more to talk about. She rarely removed her hat anymore, rarely let go of her umbrella as she sat on the edge of Mitya's bed and drove him almost mad with glimpses of her calves in tight silk stockings. And then, before she rode away again, before she told him once more that she would not be home that evening-she had to see someone with mother!-she always acted out the same small scene, obviously designed both to make a fool of him and to offer compensation for his "silly worrying," as Katya called it: glancing at the door with affected secrecy, she slipped down from the bed and brushed her hip against his leg, said to him in a hurried whisper, "Quickly-kiss me!"
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Elagin Affair And Other Stories by Ivan Bunin Copyright © 2005 by Ivan R. Dee, Inc. . Excerpted by permission.
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Contents Acknowledgments....................ix
Introduction....................xi
Mitya's Love....................3
Cleansing Monday....................71
The Elagin Affair....................88
Tanya....................131
Sukhodol....................154
The Scent of Apples....................224
Notes to the Stories....................243
