Fifty-Two Stories

“But I didn’t mean…,” said Vassilyev, laughing. “Did I refuse?”

The vodka warmed his insides. He looked tenderly at his friends, admired and envied them. How balanced everything was in these healthy, strong, cheerful people, how everything in their minds and souls was finished and smooth! They sing, and they passionately love the theater, and they draw, and they talk and drink a lot, and don’t have a headache the next day; they are poetic, and dissolute, and tender, and bold; they know how to work, to be indignant, to laugh for no reason, to say silly things; they are hot-headed, honest, self-sacrificing, and, as human beings, no worse in any way than he, Vassilyev, who watches his every step and every word, is self-conscious, prudent, and ready to elevate the least trifle to the level of a problem. And he wished to live like his friends for at least one evening, to let himself go, to free himself from his own self-control. Must he drink vodka? Then he will drink, even if his head splits with pain tomorrow. They take him to the women? He goes. He will laugh, fool around, respond merrily to the comments of passersby…

He stepped out of the restaurant laughing. He liked his friends—one in a crumpled broad-brimmed hat with a pretense to artistic disorder, the other in a sealskin cap, not a poor man, but with the pretense of belonging to the educated bohemians; he liked the snow, the pale light of the lamps, the sharply outlined black tracks left by the soles of passersby on the first snow; he liked the air and especially that transparent, tender, naïve, as if virginal hue which can be observed in nature only twice a year: when everything gets covered with snow, and in spring on clear days or moonlit evenings when the ice is breaking up on the river.

“ ‘Without my will to these sad shores,’ ” he sang in a low voice, “ ‘an unknown force doth draw me…’ ”

And all along the way for some reason he and his friends could not free their tongues of this motif, and all three sang it mechanically, not in time with each other.

Vassilyev’s imagination pictured how he and his friends, in about ten minutes, knock on the door, how they steal to the women through dark corridors and dark rooms, how he lights a match in the darkness and suddenly sees a suffering face and a guilty smile. The unknown blonde or brunette will probably have her hair down and be wearing a white bed jacket; she will be frightened by the light, become terribly embarrassed, and say: “For God’s sake, what are you doing! Blow it out!” All this was scary, but intriguing and new.

II

From Trubnaya Square the friends turned off to Grachevka Street and soon entered the lane which Vassilyev knew of only by hearsay. Seeing two rows of houses with brightly lit windows and wide-open doors, hearing the merry sounds of pianos and fiddles—sounds that flew out of all the doors and mixed into a strange confusion, as if in the darkness above the roofs an invisible orchestra were tuning up. Vassilyev was surprised and said:

“So many houses!”

“That’s nothing!” said the medic. “In London there are ten times more. There’s around a hundred thousand such women there.”

Cabbies sat on their boxes as calmly and indifferently as in all lanes; the same people walked along the sidewalks as on other streets. No one hurried, no one hid his face in his collar, no one shook his head reproachfully…And in this indifference, in the sonorous confusion of pianos and fiddles, in the bright windows, in the wide-open doors, one felt something quite overt, brazen, bold, and sweeping. In the old days it must have been just as merry and noisy at the slave markets, and people’s faces and gaits must have expressed the same indifference.

“Let’s begin right from the beginning,” said the artist.

The friends entered a narrow corridor lit by a lamp with a reflector. When they opened the door to the front hall, a man in a black frock coat, with an unshaven lackey face and sleepy eyes, rose lazily from a yellow divan. It smelled like a laundry and of vinegar as well. From the front hall, the door led to a brightly lit room. The medic and the artist stopped in the doorway and, craning their necks, both looked in at once.

“Bona-serra, signori, rigoletto-ugonotti-traviata!” the artist began, bowing theatrically.

“Havanna-tarakana-pistoletto!” said the medic, pressing his hat to his chest and making a low bow.

Vassilyev stood behind them. He, too, would have liked to make a theatrical bow and say something silly, but he merely smiled, felt an awkwardness that resembled shame, and waited impatiently for what would follow. In the doorway appeared a little blonde of seventeen or eighteen, with bobbed hair, in a short light-blue dress with a white aiglet on her breast.

“Why are you standing in the doorway?” she said. “Take your coatses off and come in.”

The medic and the artist, still speaking Italian, went into the reception room. Vassilyev hesitantly followed them.