My objective was to spend some time on Staraya Street. And I could have got there by another, quicker route. But the reason I turned into a late hour these spacious streets with gardens was that I wanted to take a look at the grammar school. And reaching it, I marvelled again: here too everything had remained as half a century before; the stone boundary wall, the stone yard, the big stone building in the yard – everything just as conventional, boring as it had been before, in my time. I lingered by the gates, wanting to provoke in myself the sorrow, the pity of memories – and couldn’t. Yes, I had first entered these gates as a first-year with close-cropped hair[61] in a nice, new blue cap with silver palms over the peak, and in a new little greatcoat with silver buttons, then as a thin youth in a grey jacket and foppish trousers with straps under the feet – but is that really me?
Staraya Street seemed to me just a little narrower and longer than it had before. Everything else was unchanging, like everywhere. The potholed roadway, not a single little tree, on both sides the white, dusty houses of provincial merchants, the pavements potholed as well, such that it would be better to walk down the middle of the street in the full light of the moon… And the night was almost the same as that one. Only that one had been at the end of August, when the whole town smells of the apples which lie in mountains at the markets, and was so warm that it was a delight to be wearing just a kosovorotka with a Caucasian belt around it… Is it possible to remember that night somewhere up there, as if in the sky?
I could not make up my mind to go as far as your house after all. It too had probably not changed, but all the more terrible to see it. Some new people, strangers, live in it now. Your father, your mother, your brother – they all outlived young you, but also died when their time came. And every one of mine has died too, and not only my relatives, but also many, many with whom I began life in friendship or comradeship; was it so long ago that they too began, certain in their hearts there would be simply no end to it, but everything has begun, elapsed and come to an end before my eyes – so quickly, and before my eyes! And I sat down on a bollard beside some merchant’s house, impregnable behind its locks and gates, and started thinking about what she was like in those distant times of ours: simply dressed dark hair, a clear gaze, the light tan of a youthful face, a light summer dress, beneath which were the chastity, strength and freedom of a young body… That was the start of our love, a time of happiness as yet unclouded by anything, of intimacy, trustfulness, enraptured tenderness, joy…
There is something utterly special about the warm and bright nights of Russian provincial towns at the end of summer. What peace, what well-being! An old man wanders through the cheerful nocturnal town with a watchman’s rattle, but solely for his own pleasure: there’s no need to keep watch, sleep peacefully, good people; you are watched over by God’s goodwill, by this lofty, radiant sky, at which the old man casts the odd carefree glance as he wanders down the roadway, heated up in the course of the day, just occasionally, for fun, letting go a dancing shake of the rattle. And it was on such a night, at that late hour when just he alone in the town was not asleep, you were waiting for me in your family’s garden, already a little dried up towards autumn, and I slipped into it by stealth[62]: I quietly opened the gate, unlocked in advance by you, quietly and quickly ran through the yard and, behind the shed in the depths of the yard, entered the dappled twilight of the garden where, in the distance, on the bench under the apple trees, the whiteness of your dress was faintly visible, and approaching quickly, with joyous fright, I met the lustre of your waiting eyes.
And we sat, sat in a sort of bewilderment of happiness. With one hand I embraced you, sensing the beating of your heart, in the other I held your hand, feeling through it the whole of you. And it was already so late that even the rattle was not to be heard – the old man had laid down on a bench somewhere and dozed off with his pipe in his teeth, warming himself in the light of the moon. When I looked to the right, I could see the moon shining high and sinless above the yard, and the roof of the house gleaming with piscine lustre. When I looked to the left, I saw a path, overgrown with dry grasses, disappearing under more apple trees, and beyond them, peeping out low from behind some other garden, a solitary green star, glimmering impassively, and at the same time expectantly, and soundlessly saying something. But both the yard and the star I saw only in glimpses – there was one thing in the world: the delicate twilight and the radiant twinkling in the twilight of your eyes.
And then you accompanied me as far as the gate, and I said:
“If there is a future life and we meet in it, I shall kneel down there and kiss your feet for all that you gave me on earth.”
I went out into the middle of the bright street and set off for my town-house lodgings. Turning back, I saw there was still whiteness in the gateway.
Now, rising from the bollard, I set off back by the same route by which I had come. No, I had, apart from Staraya Street, another objective too, one which I was afraid to acknowledge to myself, but the fulfilment of which was, I knew, unavoidable. And I set off – to take a look and leave, this time for ever.
The road was again familiar. Always straight ahead, then to the left, through the market, and from the market – along Monastyrskaya – towards the exit from town.
The market is like another town within the town. Very strong-smelling rows of stalls. In the refreshments row, under awnings above long tables and benches, it is gloomy. In the hardware row[63], on a chain over the middle of the passage hangs an icon of a big-eyed Saviour in a rusty setting. In the flour row in the mornings there was always a whole flock of pigeons running about and pecking along the roadway. You’re on your way to school – what a lot of them! And all fat, with iridescent craws – they peck and run, waggling their tails in a feminine way, swinging from side to side, twitching their heads monotonously, not seeming to notice you: they fly up, their wings whistling, only when you almost step on one of them. And here in the night-time large, dark rats, foul and ugly, rushed around quickly, preoccupied.
Monastyrskaya Street juts out into the fields, and is then a road: for some, out of town towards home, to the village, for others – to the town of the dead. In Paris, house number such-and-such in such-and-such a street is marked out from all other houses for two days by the pestilential stage properties of the porch, of its coal-black and silver frame, for two days a sheet of paper in a coal-black border lies in the porch on the coal-black shroud of a little table – polite visitors sign their names on it as a mark of sympathy; then, at a certain final time, by the porch stops a huge chariot with a coal-black canopy, the wood of which is black, resinous, like a plague coffin, the rounded cut-outs of the skirts of the canopy bear witness to the heavens with large white stars, while the corners of the top are crowned with curly, coal-black plumes – the feathers of an ostrich from the underworld; harnessed to the chariot are strapping monsters in coal-black horned horse cloths with white-ringed eye sockets; on the interminably high coach box sits an old drunkard waiting for the bearing-out, symbolically dressed up too in a theatrical burial uniform and a similar three-cornered hat, probably forever smirking inwardly at those solemn words: “Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis[64].” Here everything is different. A breeze blows down Monastyrskaya from the fields, and the open coffin is carried into it on towels, while the rice-coloured face with a vivid ribbon on the forehead above the closed, bulging eyes rocks from side to side. She too was carried thus.
At the exit, to the left of the highway, is a monastery from the times of Alexei Mikhailovich