Fifty-Two Stories

He admired her freshness, the naïve expression of her eyes and cheeks. Even in the way her dress sat on her, he saw something extraordinarily sweet, touching in its simple and naïve grace. And at the same time, despite this naïveté, she seemed to him very intelligent and developed beyond her age. He could talk with her about literature, about art, about anything; he could complain to her about life, about people, though it would happen during a serious conversation that she would suddenly start laughing inappropriately or run off into the house. Like nearly all the girls in S., she read a great deal (in general people read little in S., and in the local library they said that if it were not for the girls and the young Jews, they could just as well close the library); that delighted Startsev no end, and he excitedly asked her each time what she had been reading lately and listened, enchanted, as she told him.

“What have you been reading this week, while we haven’t seen each other?” he asked now. “Speak, I beg you.”

“I’ve been reading Pisemsky.”⁸

“What exactly?”

“A Thousand Souls,” Kotik replied. “And what a funny name Pisemsky has: Alexei Feofilaktych!”

“Where are you going?” Startsev said, horrified, when she suddenly got up and walked towards the house. “I’ve got to talk to you, I must tell you…Stay with me for at least five minutes! I beseech you!”

She stopped as if she wished to say something, then awkwardly thrust a note into his hand and ran into the house, and there sat down at the piano again.

“Tonight, at eleven o’clock,” Startsev read, “be in the cemetery by Demetti’s memorial.”

“Well, that’s not smart at all,” he thought, having come to his senses. “Why the cemetery? What for?”

It was clear: Kotik was fooling. Indeed, who would seriously conceive of scheduling a meeting at night, far from town, in a cemetery, when it could easily be arranged on the street, in the town park? And was it fitting for him, a zemstvo doctor, an intelligent, serious man, to sigh, to receive little notes, to drag himself to cemeteries, to do stupid things that even schoolboys would laugh at nowadays? What would this love affair come to? What would his colleagues say when they learned of it? So Startsev was thinking as he wandered among the tables in his club, and at half past ten he suddenly up and drove to the cemetery.

He already had his own pair of horses and the coachman Panteleimon in a velvet waistcoat. The moon was shining. It was quiet, warm, but warm in an autumnal way. In the outskirts, by the slaughterhouse, dogs were howling. Startsev left the horses at the edge of town, in one of the lanes, and went to the cemetery on foot. “People have their oddities,” he thought. “Kotik is also an odd one and—who knows?—maybe she’s not joking and will come,” and he surrendered to this weak, futile hope, and it intoxicated him.

He walked half a mile across a field. The cemetery appeared in the distance as a dark strip, like a grove or a big garden. He saw the white stone fence, the gate…In the moonlight one could read on the gate: “The hour is nigh…” Startsev went through the gate, and first of all he saw white crosses and tombstones on both sides of a wide alley, and the dark shadows cast by them and the poplars; and the white and black stretched far around, and sleepy trees bowed their branches over the white. It seemed brighter here than in the field; the maple leaves, looking like paws, were sharply outlined on the yellow sand of the alleys and on the slabs, and the inscriptions on the tombstones were clearly visible. In the first moments, Startsev was struck by what he was now seeing for the first time in his life and would probably not chance to see again: a world unlike anything else—a world where moonlight was so lovely and gentle, as if this were its cradle, where there was no life, no, no, but in each dark poplar, in each grave, one felt the presence of a mystery, promising a quiet, beautiful, eternal life. Along with the scent of autumn leaves, the tombstones and the withered flowers breathed of forgiveness, sorrow, and peace.

All around there was silence; stars looked down from the sky in profound humility, and the sound of Startsev’s footsteps was loud and out of place. And only when the clock began to strike in the church and he imagined himself dead, buried there for all eternity, did it seem to him that someone was looking at him, and for a moment he thought that this was not peace and quiet, but the blank anguish of non-being, suppressed despair…

The Demetti memorial was in the form of a chapel with an angel on top. Once the Italian opera was passing through S. One of the singers died, was buried, and this memorial was set up. No one in town remembered her, but the lamp over the entrance reflected the moonlight and looked like it was burning.