Love and Youth Read online

  IVAN TURGENEV

  LOVE AND YOUTH

  Essential Stories

  Translated from the Russian

  by Nicolas Pasternak Slater and Maya Slater

  PUSHKIN PRESS

  LONDON

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  FIRST LOVE

  BEZHIN MEADOW

  BIRYUK

  THE RATTLING!

  THE DISTRICT DOCTOR

  THE LOVERS’ MEETING

  ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

  COPYRIGHT

  FIRST LOVE

  The other guests had left long ago. The clock struck half past midnight. The host, and Sergei Nikolaevich, and Vladimir Petrovich, were the only people left in the room.

  The host rang for the remains of their dinner to be cleared away.

  ‘So that’s agreed,’ he said, settling himself deeper in his armchair and lighting a cigar. ‘Each of us has to tell the story of his first love. Sergei Nikolaevich, you start.’

  Sergei Nikolaevich, a plump little man with a chubby, fair-skinned face, first looked at his host and then stared up at the ceiling.

  ‘I never had a first love,’ he said finally. ‘I started with my second.’

  ‘How did that happen?’

  ‘Very simply. I was eighteen when I had my first flirtation, with a most attractive young lady. But I courted her as if I’d done it all before, just the way that later on I courted other girls. In point of fact, I fell in love for the first and last time when I was six, and it was with my nurse. But that was a very long time ago. I can’t remember anything about our relationship—and even if I could, who’d be interested?’

  ‘So what are we to do?’ began the host. ‘There was nothing particularly interesting about my first love either. I never fell in love with anyone till I met Anna Ivanovna, who’s now my wife; and everything went perfectly smoothly for us, our parents arranged the match, we soon found we were in love, and got married as quickly as we could. My story can be told in a couple of words. I must admit, gentlemen, that when I raised the question of our first loves, I was relying on you—I won’t say old bachelors, but bachelors who aren’t as young as you were. Have you anything entertaining to tell us, Vladimir Petrovich?’

  Vladimir Petrovich, a man of about forty with black hair just turning grey, hesitated a little and then said, ‘My first love, it’s true, was rather out of the ordinary.’

  ‘Aha!’ said the host and Sergei Nikolaevich in unison. ‘All the better … Tell us about it.’

  ‘Very well … Or no, I shan’t tell it, I’m not good at storytelling. It either comes out too short and sketchy, or too wordy and affected. If you don’t mind, I’ll write down all I can remember in a notebook, and then read it to you.’

  At first his friends wouldn’t have this, but Vladimir Petrovich insisted. Two weeks later they met again, and he kept his promise.

  Here is the story in his notebook:

  I

  It happened in the summer of 1833, when I was sixteen.

  I was living in Moscow with my parents. They had rented a dacha for the summer near the Kaluga gate, opposite Neskuchny Gardens. I was studying for my university entrance, but I was taking it easy and doing very little work.

  No one interfered with my freedom. I did what I liked, especially once I had parted from my tutor, a Frenchman who could never get over the fact that he had fallen into Russia ‘like a bomb’ (‘comme une bombe’), and spent days lying on his bed with a sour look on his face. My father was affectionate but off hand with me. Mother took almost no notice of me, though she had no other children. She was fully occupied with other worries. My father, still a young and very handsome man, had made a marriage of convenience: she was ten years older than him. She lived a melancholy life, always anxious, jealous and crotchety, except in his presence. She was very frightened of him; he was stern, cold and distant with her … I have never known a calmer, more composed, confident and controlling man than him.

  I shall never forget my first weeks in that dacha. The weather was beautiful; we moved there from town on the ninth of May, St Nicholas’s day. I went for walks either in our own garden, or in Neskuchny Gardens, or outside the city gates, taking some book or other with me, perhaps Kaidanov’s textbook; but I hardly ever opened it, and mostly just recited poetry aloud to myself—for I knew a lot of poetry by heart. My blood was in a ferment, my heart ached so sweetly and absurdly; I was endlessly waiting for something, dreading something, filled with wonder and anticipation; my imagination fluttered and soared and returned to the same fancies over and again, like martins circling a bell tower at sunrise; I was dreamy, and gloomy, and even wept; but through my very sorrows and tears, brought on perhaps by the music of a verse or a beautiful evening, there sprang up, like the fresh grass in springtime, a joyful sense of youth and burgeoning life.

  I had a horse to ride, and I used to saddle it myself and wander far away on my own, breaking into a gallop and imagining that I was a jousting knight … How merrily the wind whistled in my ears! … Or I would just turn my face up to the sky, to fill my thirsty soul with its radiant azure light.

  At the time, I remember, the image of a woman, the idea of love, hardly ever took definite shape in my mind; yet behind everything I thought and felt, there lay hidden a half-aware, shy presentiment of something new, something unutterably sweet and feminine …

  That presentiment, that expectation, flooded my whole being. I breathed it, it flowed through my veins in every drop of my blood … And it was soon to come true.

  Our dacha consisted of the main wooden house, with a colonnade, and two small lodges. The lodge on the left housed a tiny workshop making cheap wallpapers. I had gone in there several times to watch a dozen skinny, scruffy youths with drink-sodden faces, wearing greasy smocks. They kept jumping in the air to grab the wooden levers and press down the rectangular wooden blocks of the press, using the weight of their puny bodies to print out the brightly coloured wallpaper designs. The lodge on the right stood empty and was rented out. One day, some three weeks after the ninth of May, the shutters of that building were opened up and I saw women’s faces at the windows. A family had moved in. At lunch that same day, I remember my mother asking our servant who our new neighbours were. When she heard the name of Princess Zasekina, she first commented respectfully, ‘Ah! A princess …’ but then added, ‘She must be quite hard up.’

  ‘Arrived in three hired cabs, madame,’ replied the servant, deferentially offering her a dish. ‘They don’t have a carriage of their own, and their furniture’s very ordinary.’

  ‘Yes,’ returned my mother. ‘But it’s better that way.’

  My father cast her a frigid glance, and she fell silent.

  And indeed, Princess Zasekina could not have been a rich woman. The little house she had rented was so ancient, and small, and squat, that no one even moderately well off could have chosen to live there. But at the time, all this went in one ear and out of the other. I was not particularly impressed by her princely title—I had just read Schiller’s The Robbers.

  II

  Every evening I used to stroll round our garden with my shotgun, on the lookout for rooks. I had long detested these wary, crafty and rapacious birds. On that particular day I went out into the garden, and after I had been down all the paths without seeing any rooks (they had recognized me, and were just cawing sporadically in the distance), I happened to approach the low fence that separated our own grounds from the narrow strip of the right-hand lodge garden. I was walking with my head bowed. Suddenly I heard voices, and when I looked over the fence, I was thunderstruck by the strange sight that met my eyes.

  A few paces away, on the grass among the leafy raspberry bushes, stood a tall, slender girl in a pink strip
ed dress with a white scarf tied round her head. Four young men crowded round her, and she was tapping each of them in turn on the brow with a bunch of those small grey flowers—I don’t remember their name, but children know them very well. The flowers grow little pods which burst with a snap if you strike them against something hard. The young men were offering their foreheads so eagerly, and the girl’s movements (I was looking at her from the side) were so enchanting, imperious, caressing, mocking and sweet, that I almost cried out in astonishment and delight. I think I would have given anything in the world just to have those lovely little fingers tap me on my forehead too. My gun slipped onto the grass. I forgot everything, while my eyes devoured her graceful form, her neck, her beautiful arms, her slightly ruffled fair hair under its white scarf, and her alert, narrowed eye, and those eyelashes, and the soft cheek beneath them …

  ‘Young man! Hey, you, young man!’ said a voice beside me suddenly. ‘Do you think you ought to be staring at young ladies you don’t know?’

  I started, and froze where I stood. On the far side of the fence, a man with short black hair was standing quite close to me and giving me an ironic look. And at that very moment, the girl turned towards me. I saw a pair of large grey eyes in a lively, excited face, and suddenly she was quivering with laughter all over that face of hers, her white teeth were glistening, her eyebrows seemed to be raised … Red in the face, I grabbed my gun from the grass and fled, pursued by ringing laughter that had no malice to it. I ran off to my room, flung myself down on my bed and covered my face with my hands. My heart was pounding. I was bitterly ashamed, and yet glad; I had never felt so excited in my life.

  When I recovered, I brushed my hair, cleaned myself up and went down to tea. The image of that young girl hovered before me; my heart had stopped pounding, but was filled with a kind of delicious tension.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ asked my father suddenly. ‘Shot a rook?’

  I wanted to tell him all about it, but I held my tongue and just smiled to myself. I don’t know why, but when I retired to my room, I spun round three times on one leg, pomaded my hair, got into bed and slept like a dead man all night. In the early morning I woke for a moment, raised my head, looked around in delight, and went back to sleep.

  III

  ‘How can I get to know them?’ That was my first thought when I woke next morning. I went out into the garden before my morning tea, but without going too close to the fence; and I saw no one. After my tea I walked up and down the road in front of the dacha a few times and looked into the windows from a distance … I thought I saw her face behind a curtain, took fright and hurried away. ‘I really have to meet her,’ I thought, pacing distractedly up and down the sandy patch of ground outside Neskuchny Park. ‘But how? That is the question.’ I recalled every detail of our meeting the day before: for some reason I remembered particularly clearly how she had laughed at me. But even as I made one anxious plan after another, fate had already lent a helping hand.

  While I was out, a letter had come for my mother from our new neighbour. It was written on grey paper and sealed with brown sealing wax, the kind that is only used on notes from the post office or the corks of cheap wine bottles. In this half-illiterate, messily written letter, the princess begged my mother to use her influence to help her: in the princess’s words, my mother was closely acquainted with highly placed persons who could decide the fate of herself and her children, since she was involved in very important lawsuits. ‘Im writing you,’ she went on, ‘as one Gentlewoman to another, and its a Great plesure for me too take this opertunity too do so.’ In conclusion, she begged my mother’s permission to pay her a visit. I found my mother very much put out. My father was not at home, and she had nobody to ask for advice. Not to answer this ‘Gentlewoman’—and a princess at that—was unthinkable. But how to answer her? She had no idea. It seemed wrong to send her a note in French, but my mother’s own Russian spelling was uncertain. She was aware of it, and didn’t want to expose herself. She was relieved when I came in, and at once told me to step round to the princess and tell her that my mother would always be happy to serve Her Excellency in any way she could, and to invite her over after midday. I was half delighted and half scared to have my secret desires fulfilled so promptly and unexpectedly, but I hid my confusion and ran upstairs to my room to put on a new tie and tailcoat. At home I was still going round in short jackets and soft collars, which I hated.

  IV

  I couldn’t help trembling all over as I stepped into the cramped, untidy hallway of the lodge. I was met by a grey-haired old servant with a swarthy, copper-coloured face, surly little piggy eyes, and the deepest furrows on his forehead and temples that I had ever seen. On the dish he was carrying lay a herringbone, gnawed clean. Holding the door to the next room open with his foot, he snapped: ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Is Princess Zasekina home?’ I asked.

  ‘Boniface!’ cried a quavering female voice from inside the room.

  Without a word, the servant turned his back on me, displaying the threadbare back of his livery coat with its single rusty crested button. He put the plate down on the floor and went away.

  ‘Have you been to the police?’ called the same female voice. The servant muttered something in reply. ‘Eh? Someone’s called?’ the voice repeated. ‘The young gentleman from next door? Well, ask him in, then.’

  ‘Will you step into the drawing room?’ said the servant, reappearing in front of me and picking up the plate.

  I straightened my clothes and went into what they called the ‘drawing room’.

  I found myself in a small, rather untidy room with cheap furniture that seemed to have been hastily arranged around it. By the window, in an easy chair with a broken arm, sat a woman of about fifty, bareheaded and ugly, in an old green dress; she had a woollen scarf with a garish pattern round her neck. Her small dark eyes bored into my face.

  I went up to her and bowed.

  ‘Do I have the honour of speaking to Princess Zasekina?’

  ‘Yes, I’m Princess Zasekina. Are you Mr V.’s son?’

  ‘Yes, madame. My mother has sent me round with a message.’

  ‘Do sit down. Boniface! Where are my keys? Have you seen them anywhere?’

  I passed on my mother’s reply to the princess’s note. She heard me out, tapping on the windowsill with her podgy red fingers, and when I finished she fixed her eyes on me once more.

  ‘Very well, I’ll certainly come over,’ she said at last. ‘How young you seem! How old are you, might I ask?’

  ‘Sixteen,’ I answered hesitantly. The princess pulled some greasy scribbled sheets of paper from her pocket, brought them right up to her nose and began to leaf through them.

  ‘That’s a good age,’ she suddenly announced, turning round and shuffling her chair. ‘Now please, don’t stand on ceremony with me. We’re free and easy here.’

  ‘Too free and easy,’ I thought, eyeing her unattractive person with involuntary distaste.

  At that moment another door was thrown open and a girl appeared, the one I had seen in the garden the day before. She raised a hand, and gave me a mocking smile.

  ‘And here’s my daughter,’ said the princess, gesturing at her with an elbow. ‘Zinochka, this is our neighbour Mr V.’s son. What’s your name, may I ask?’

  ‘Vladimir,’ I whispered, rising to my feet in confusion.

  ‘And after your father? …’

  ‘Petrovich.’

  ‘Ah! I used to know a police inspector called Vladimir Petrovich, like you. Boniface! No need to hunt for the keys, they’re in my pocket.’

  The girl was still looking at me with that mocking smile, narrowing her eyes and cocking her head a little to one side.

  ‘I’ve already met Monsieur Voldemar,’ she said. The sound of her silvery voice gave me a delicious shiver. ‘Will you allow me to call you that?’

  ‘By all means,’ I stammered.

  ‘Where was that?’ asked the princess; but her dau
ghter did not reply.

  ‘Are you busy just now?’ she asked me, not taking her eyes off me.

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘Would you like to help me wind some wool? Come along to my room.’

  She nodded to me and left the room; I followed her.

  The furniture in her room was of rather better quality, and arranged with more taste. Though at that moment I noticed almost nothing—I was moving as if in a dream, my whole being filled with a stupid sort of intense bliss.

  The young princess sat down, took up a skein of red wool and motioned me to sit on the chair opposite her. Then she carefully loosened the skein and draped it over my hands. All this she did in silence, with a sort of comical deliberation, and still with that same bright, sly smile on her half-open lips. She started winding the wool onto a folded piece of card, and suddenly directed such a quick and dazzling glance at me that I could not help lowering my eyes. When she fully opened her own eyes, which she generally kept half-closed, her face was quite transformed, as though flooded with light.

  ‘What did you think of me yesterday, Monsieur Voldemar?’ she asked after a pause. ‘You probably judged me harshly?’

  ‘I … Princess … I didn’t think anything … how could I …’ I answered in confusion.

  ‘Listen,’ she took me up. ‘You don’t know me yet. I’m a very strange person. I want people always to tell me the truth. I’m told you’re sixteen. I’m twenty-one; so you see I’m much older than you, and that means you always have to tell me the truth … and do what I tell you,’ she added. ‘Look at me. Why don’t you look at me?’

  I became even more embarrassed—but I looked up at her. She smiled, not with the same smile as before, but a different one, a smile of approval.

  ‘Look at me,’ she said again, lowering her voice affectionately. ‘I don’t mind … I like your face; I have a feeling we’re going to be friends. Do you like me?’ she added slyly.