I
It was before dinner and Dr. Iliashenko had just finished bathing with a student named Voskresenski. The warm, southeast wind had whipped the sea into eddies. Close to the shore, the water was murky and had a sharp smell of fish and sea-plants. The hot, swinging waves did not cool and refresh one’s body, but on the contrary, fatigued and unnerved it still more.
“Come on out, my colleague,” the doctor exclaimed as he splashed a handful of water over his own large white stomach. “We shall get faint if we go on bathing like this.”
From the bathing-machine, they had to climb up the mountain along a narrow path which was laid in friable black slate, zigzag fashion, covered with small rough oak and pale green sea-cole heads. Voskresceski climbed up easily, his long muscular legs moving in spacious strides. But the fat doctor, who wore a wet towel instead of a hat, succumbed to the heat and to his asthma. He came to a dead stop at last with his hand on his heart, shaking his head and breathing laboriously.
“Phew! I can’t stick it any longer. I’d almost rather be back in the water. Let’s stop for a minute.”
They halted in a flat circle between two joints of the path, and both of them turned round to face the sea.
Flogged by the wind, now dazzlingly lit up by the sun, now shadowed by clouds—it was a medley of patches of colour. By the shore, the white foam melted into a large fringe of tulle lace on the sand; further out ran a dirty ribbon of light chocolate colour, still further lay a miserable green band, all wrinkled up and furrowed by the crests of the waves, and last of all—the powerful, tranquil bluishness of the deep sea with those fantastically bright spots—sometimes of deep purple, sometimes of a tender malachite colour, with unexpected shining pieces like ice covered with snow. The whole of this living mosaic seemed to be belted at the horizon by the black, quiet, motionless ribbon of the shoreless distance.
“All the same, it’s good, isn’t it?” said the doctor. “It’s a beauty, isn’t it? Eh?”
He stretched out his short arm, fat like an infant’s, and with widespread fingers theatrically stroked, as it were, the course of the sea.
“Oh, it’s all right,” Voskresenski answered with a half-affected yawn, “but one soon gets sick of it. It’s just decoration.”
“Yes, yes, we’ve eaten it. There’s a yarn about that sort of thing,” Iliashenko explained. “A soldier came home to his village after the war. Well, of course, he lies like an elephant and the village folk were naturally wonder-struck: ‘We went,’ says he, ‘to the Balkans, that is to say, into the very clouds, right into the middle of them.’ ‘Oh, dear, have you really been in the clouds?’ The soldier answered indifferently: ‘Well, what are the clouds to us? We ate them the same as jelly.’ ”
Dr. Iliashenko loved telling stories, particularly those from the life of the people and from Jewish life. Deep down in his heart, he thought that it was only through a caprice of destiny that he had not become an actor. At home he would madden his wife and children with Ostrovski, and, when paying his patients a visit, he liked to recite Nikitine’s “The Driver,” for which he would unfailingly rise to his feet, turn a chair round, and lean on its back with his hands turned outwards. He read in the most unnatural, internal voice, as though he were a ventriloquist, under the impression that this was how a Russian muzhik would speak.
After telling the story about the soldier he immediately burst out into a free, boisterous laugh. Voskresenski forced himself to smile.
“You see, doctor, the south …” he began in his jaded way, as though he had difficulty in choosing his words. “I’m not fond of the south. Here everything … somehow or other … is oily … somehow … I don’t know … excessive. Look at that magnolia … but forgive me for asking, is it a plant? It seems as if it had been made up out of cardboard, painted green, and varnished at the top. Then look at Nature here. The sun goes up from the sea, we have the heat, in the evening it goes over the mountains and it is night at once. No birds! Nothing of our northern dawn with the smell of young grass in it, nothing of the poetry, of twilight with the beetles, the nightingales, the stamp of cattle trotting in the dust. It’s all opera scenery, but it isn’t Nature.”
“In your hou … se,” the doctor sang in a hoarse little tenor. “Of course you are a Moscow town bird.”
“And these moonlit nights, deuce take them!” Voskresenski continued, as old thoughts which, up till now, he had kept to himself, stirred in him with new force. “It’s a perfect torment. The sea is glossy, the stones are glossy, the trees are glossy. It’s a regular oleography; the stupid cicadas squall; you can’t hide from the moon. It’s sickening, and somehow or other you get agitated as if someone were tickling you in the nose with a straw.”
“What a barbarian you are! Why, in that Moscow of yours they’re having twenty-five degrees of frost, and even the policemen are almost frozen, while here the roses are in full bloom and one can bathe.”
“And I don’t like the southern people either,” the student went on, following stubbornly his own thoughts. “Rotten little people, lazy, sensual, with narrow foreheads, sly, dirty; they gobble up any sort of filth. Even their poetry is somehow or other oily and mawkish; in a word, I can’t bear them.”
The doctor pulled up again, swung his arms and made round, stupefied eyes.
“Tu-tu-tu,” he went in a long whistle. “Et tu, Brute? I catch in your words the spirit of our honoured patron. The Russian song, the Russian shirt, eh? The Russian God, and the Russian largeness? The Jews, the Sheenies, the Poles, and the other poor devils, eh?”
“That’s enough, Ivan Nikolaevitch. Stop that,” Voskresenski said curtly. His face had grown suddenly pale and wrinkled as though from toothache. “There is nothing to laugh at in this. You know my point of view very well. If I haven’t run away from this parrot, this fool, up till now, it is only because one must eat, but it’s all much more saddening than funny. It’s enough that for twenty-five roubles a month I deny myself every day the delight of expressing what suffocates me—strangles my very throat, what lowers all my thoughts.”
“First rate; but why get so hot about it?”
“Oh, I’d like to tell him many things,” the student exclaimed, furiously shaking his strong fist, which was whitened by the tension of the muscles. “I’d like to—Oh, this buffoon … Well, never mind—we’re not strapped to each other for a century.”
Suddenly the doctor’s eyes narrowed and glittered. He took hold of Voskresenski’s arm and, leaning his head playfully against his shoulder, whispered: “Listen, my boy; why boil up like this? What sense is there in insulting Zavalishine? It will only mean a row in a noble house, as one says, just that. You had much better combine the sweetness of vengeance with the delights of love. What about Anna Georgievna—eh? Or has that come off already?”
The student remained silent and tried to free his arm from the doctor’s hand. But the other pressed it still more tightly and continued to whisper, his laughing eyes playing all the time:
“You queer fellow, you’ve no notion of taste. The woman is thirty-five years old, in full bloom, all fire—and her figure! Haven’t you had enough of playing Joseph? She looks at you the way a cat looks at cream. Why be too scrupulous in your own country? Remember the aphorism: A woman with experience is like a cherry picked by a sparrow—it’s all the sweeter. Ah, where is my youth?” he began theatrically in a high-pitched, bleating, throaty voice. “Where is my youth? Where is my thick crop of hair, my thirty-two teeth in my mouth, my—”
Voskresenski managed at last to free himself from the doctor’s clutch, but he did this so roughly that they both felt awkward.
“Forgive me, Ivan Nikolaevitch, but I simply can’t listen to such meanness. It isn’t bashfulness, it isn’t chastity, but it merely feels dirty, and—speaking generally—I don’t like it. I can’t—”
The doctor threw up his arms mockingly and slapped his thighs: “My dear fellow, you mean that you can’t take a joke? Personally, I have the greatest respect for other people’s convictions and, honestly, I rejoice to see among the youth of today so many who look on these matters cleanly and honestly. But why can’t one joke a little without your spreading your tail like a peacock immediately? Why?”
“Forgive me,” the student said, in a muffled voice.
“Ah, my dear fellow, that’s not why I am saying all this. The fact is, you’ve got into a twitching state, the whole lot of you young fellows. Look at you, a strong man with a big chest and shoulders—why, your nerves are like a schoolgirl’s. By the by, look here,” the doctor went on in a businesslike tone, “you oughtn’t to bathe quite so often, particularly in such a hot spell. Not being used to it, you know, you might bathe yourself into a serious illness. One of my patients contracted a nervous eczema through overdoses of sea-bathing.”
They were now walking along the last open stretch of the path, which had become practically smooth. To their right, the mountain rose almost to a perpendicular, while behind them, in the distance, the boiling sea seethed endlessly. To their left, bushes of dog-roses, covered with tender pink blossoms, clung to the slope, projecting above the reddish-yellow earth and the grey corked stones that resembled the backs of recumbent animals. The student was glancing at the ground between his feet with a look of angry confusion.
“It has turned out so badly,” he thought with a frown. “Yes, somehow it has turned out stupidly. As a matter of fact, the doctor’s a good sort, always attentive, patient, even-tempered. It’s true that he’s sometimes a bit of a clown, a chatterbox, reads nothing, uses bad language and has got slack, thanks to his easygoing practice at a healthresort. … But all the same, he’s a good fellow and I’ve been brusque and rude to him—”
In the meanwhile, Iliashenko was carelessly knocking off with his walking-stick the little thin white flowers that smelt like bitter almonds, while he sang to himself in an undertone:
“In your hou … se I knew fi … rst
The sweetness of a pure and tender love.”