Dark Avenues / Темные аллеи. Книга для чтения на английском языке. Иван БунинЧитать онлайн книгу.

---

Скачать книгу

---

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], a kosovorotka and poddyovka[41], and was proud of his Russian character – and now, in the torrential rain and thunder, feeling the coldness of the water pouring from the peak of his cap and his nose, he was full of the energetic pleasure of rural life. This summer he often recalled the summer of the previous year, when, because of a liaison with a well-known actress, he had moped the time away in Moscow right up until July, until her departure for Kislovodsk: idleness, the heat, the hot stench and green smoke from the asphalt glowing in iron vats in the upturned streets, lunches in the Troitsky basement tavern with actors from the Maly Theatre who were preparing to leave for the Caucasus too, then sitting in the Tremblé coffee house, and waiting for her in the evening at his apartment with the furniture under covers, with the chandeliers and pictures in muslin, with the smell of mothballs… The summer evenings in Moscow are unending, it gets dark only towards eleven, and there you are, waiting, waiting – and still she’s not there. Then finally the bell – and it’s her, in all her summer smartness, and her breathless voice: “Please do forgive me, I’ve been flat on my back all day with a headache, your tea rose has completely wilted, I was in such a hurry I took a fast cab, I’m terribly hungry…”

      When the torrential rain and the shaking peals of thunder began to die down and move away and it began clearing up all around, up ahead, to the left of the highway, the familiar coaching inn of an old widower, the petty bourgeois Pronin, appeared. There were still twenty kilometres to go to town – I should wait a little, thought Krasilschikov, the horse is all in a lather, and there’s still no knowing what might happen again, look how black it is in that direction, and it’s still lighting up… At the crossing point to the inn he turned at a trot and reined the horse in beside the wooden porch.

      “Granddad!” he gave a loud cry. “You’ve got a guest!”

      But the windows in the log building under its rusty iron roof were dark, nobody responded to the cry. Krasilschikov wound the reins onto the dashboard, went up onto the porch after the wet and dirty dog which had leapt up onto it – it had a mad look, its eyes shone brightly and senselessly – pushed the cap back from his sweaty forehead, took off his jacket, heavy with water, threw it onto the handrail of the porch, and, remaining in just a poddyovka with a leather belt decorated in silver, he wiped his face, mottled with muddy splashes, and began cleaning the mud from the tops of his boots with his whip handle. The door into the lobby was open, but there was a feeling of the building being empty. Probably bringing in the livestock, he thought, and, straightening up, he looked into the fields: should he drive on? The evening air was still and damp, in different directions in the distance quails were making a cheerful noise in corn crops heavy with moisture, the rain had stopped, but night was coming on, the sky and earth were darkening morosely, and a cloud beyond the highway, behind a low, inky ridge of woodland, was a still more dense and gloomy black, and a red flame was flaring up, widespread and ominous – and Krasilschikov strode into the lobby and groped in the darkness for the door into the living quarters. But they were dark and quiet, only somewhere on a wall was

---

Скачать книгу