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

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:

      “I pressed up behind a fir tree and they didn’t see me,” said Grishka fervently with his eyes popping out, “but I saw everything. She was terribly pretty, only all red, it was still terribly hot, and, of course, she’d spent too long bathing, I mean, she always sits in the water and swims for two hours at a time – I spied on that too – naked she’s simply a naiad[121], and he was talking and talking, really and truly like a Turk…”

      Grishka swore it, but he liked inventing all sorts of silly things, and Zoyka both did and did not believe it.

      On Saturdays and Sundays, the trains that came to their station from Moscow were crammed full of people, weekend guests of the dacha-dwellers, even in the morning. Sometimes there was that delightful rain through sunshine, when the green carriages were washed down by it and shone like new, the white clouds of smoke from the steam engine seemed especially soft, and the green tops of the pines, standing elegant and thick behind the train, drew circles unusually high in the bright sky. The new arrivals vied with each other to grab the cab men’s chaises on the rutted hot sand behind the station, and drove with the joy of the dacha down the sandy roads in the cuttings of the forest under the ribbons of sky above them. The complete happiness of the dacha set in when in the forest, which endlessly hid the dry, slightly undulating land all around. Dacha-dwellers taking their Muscovite friends for a walk said that bears were the only thing lacking here, they declaimed, “Both of resin and wild strawb’rries smells the shady wood,”[122] and hallooed one another, enjoyed their summer well-being, their idleness and freedom of dress – kosovorotkas with embroidered hems worn outside of trousers[123], the long braids of coloured belts, peaked canvas caps: the odd Muscovite acquaintance, some professor or journal editor, bearded and wearing glasses, was not even immediately recognizable in such a kosovorotka and such a cap.

      Amidst all this dacha happiness Levitsky was doubly unhappy. Feeling himself from morning till evening pitiful, deceived, superfluous, he suffered all the more for understanding very well how vulgar his unhappiness was. Day and night he had one and the same thought: why, why had she so quickly and pitilessly let him close to her, made him not quite her friend, not quite her slave, and then her lover, who had had to be content with the rare and always unexpected happiness of kisses alone, why had she sometimes been intimate with him, sometimes formal, and how had she had the cruelty so simply and so easily to cease even noticing him all of a sudden on the very first day of her acquaintance with Titov? He was burning up with shame over his brazen loitering on the estate too. Tomorrow he should disappear, flee in secret to Moscow, hide from everyone with this ignominious unhappiness of deceived dacha love, so evident even for the servants in the house! But at this thought he was so pierced by the recollection of the velvetiness of her cherry-red lips that he lost the power of his arms and legs. If he was sitting on the balcony alone and she by chance was passing, she would with excessive naturalness say something particularly insignificant to him as she went – “Now where ever can my aunt be? You haven’t seen her?” – and he would hasten to answer her in the same tone, while ready to break into sobs[124]