Short Fiction by Aleksandr Kuprin (nonfiction book recommendations .txt) 📕

patiently waiting for his real opening. For some mysterious, remote object, known only to himself, he was studying, through the self-teaching methods of Toussaint, and Langestedt, French, German, and English. I could hear him sometimes at the other side of the partition repeating, with his terrifying pronunciation: L’abeille bourdonne, la mouche vole. When I asked him why all this was necessary he would answer with his sly benevolence: “Oh, it’s like this⁠—I’ve nothing to do.”

All the same, he knew how to enjoy himself. Somewhere on Vassilief island, he had unearthed some of his fellow-countrymen, Ukrainians from Poltava, who wore embroidered shirts, with little ribbons instead of ties, and enormously wide trousers tucked into their top boots. They used to smoke long pipes, would ostentatiously spit through the corners of their lips on to the floor, and had nothing but contempt for all our town cultivation. I went once or twice to their little evenings. They drank gorilka, not our vodka, but a special brand brought from “down there,” ate slices of pork and enormous sausages so long that one had to coil them on one’s plate in ten or fifteen circles. There was singing, too, wonderful singing, extraordinarily sad and stately. I can still remember, as if it were yesterday, Boris passing his hand nervously over his long, beautiful, wavy hair as he started the couplet of an old Cossack song.

His voice was warm, tender, slightly vibrating, and every time that I listened to him I experienced a tickling and throbbing in my chest and I felt like crying without any reason.

And afterwards one drank gorilka again and, at the end, one danced the “gopak,” one of the national Ukrainian dances. Boris’ jacket would fly away from his immense shoulders to a corner of the room and he himself would soar from end to end, rapping out the time with his heels, whistling in tune and slyly raising and lowering his dark eyebrows.

He became the head of this dear Ukrainian farm village, tucked away among the severe parallel streets of Petersburg. There was something about him attractive, charming, irresistible. And everything seemed to come to him as a joke, as if it were merely by the way. I believed now definitely in his victory over the North, but something inexplicable, something perturbing, would never leave my soul when I thought of him.

It began in the spring. Soon after Easter, which was late that year, we drove together to the islands. It was a clear, pensive, gentle evening. The quiet waters of the rivers and canals dozed peacefully beside their banks, reflecting the pink and mauve colours of the deadened sky. The young, greyish foliage of the black, century-old lime trees on the banks looked at itself in the water so naively, so joyfully. For a long time we were silent. At last, under the charm of this exquisite evening, I said slowly:

“How delightful! For the sake of an evening like this one can fall in love with Petersburg.”

He didn’t answer. I looked at him stealthily, sideways. His face was gloomy and he had an angry expression.

“Don’t you like it?” I asked.

Boris made a slight gesture of annoyance.

“It’s scenery,” he said with disgust. “It’s the same as at the opera. You call this Nature?”

A strange, dreamy expression had come suddenly into his dark eyes and he began in a low, jerky, troubled voice:

“There now, in Little Russia, there is the real spring. Wild berries, white hazel trees are blossoming. The frogs are croaking in the creeks, the nightingales are singing. When it is night there, it is real night, dark with dread, with mysterious passion. And what days there are there now! What sun, what sky! What is this Finland of yours? A mixture of rain and snow⁠ ⁠…” He turned away and became silent. But I understood instinctively that there was something wrong, something unhealthy at work in my friend’s heart.

And, in fact, from that very evening, Boris began to fret and seemed to wilt. I could hear no longer behind the partition his melodious purring; he no longer projected himself like a bomb into my room in the mornings; his usual talkativeness had disappeared. Only when conversation turned on Ukrainia would he grow animated, and then his eyes became dreamy, beautiful and pitiful, and he seemed to be looking into the distance, hundreds of miles away.

“I’ll go there for the summer,” he would say decidedly. “Damn it, at all events I’ll get a rest from the cursed Peter.”

But in the end, he didn’t succeed in going “there.” His office kept him. In the middle of the summer we said goodbye to each other⁠—I had to go abroad on business. I left him sad, irritated, tired out at last by the white nights, which brought him sleeplessness and a distress bordering on despair. He saw me off at the Warsaw station.

I returned in the very middle of a nasty, wet, foggy Petersburg autumn. Oh, how well I recall those first dismal, irritating impressions: dirty pavements, thin endless rain, a sort of grey, slimy sky and in the background of the picture rough dvorniks with their brooms, hunted-looking cabmen with their rumpled clothes, women with hideous sheepskin goloshes, the hems of their skirts all wet, bilious, angry people with perpetually swollen faces, coughs and spleen. But I was still more struck and saddened by the change that had taken place in Boris.

When I came in, he was lying dressed on his bed, which had not been made. His hands were folded under his head and he didn’t rise when he saw me.

“How are you, Boris?” I said, seized already by a feeling of presentiment, and I met with a cold, estranged glance.

Afterwards he apparently decided to greet me, for he rose as if it were a matter of duty, welcomed me and lay down again on the bed. With great difficulty, I managed to persuade him to dine with me that night at a