Читать книгу Dark Avenues / Темные аллеи. Книга для чтения на английском языке - Иван Бунин, Иван Алексеевич Бунин - Страница 10

The deacon’s son, a seminarist who had come to the village to stay with his parents for the holidays, was woken up one dark hot night by cruel bodily arousal and, lying there for a while, he inflamed himself still more with his imagination: in the afternoon, before dinner, he had been spying from a willow bush on the shore above a creek in the river on the lasses who had come there from work and, throwing their petticoats over their heads from their sweaty white bodies, with noise and guffawing, tilting their faces up and bending their backs, had flung themselves into the hotly gleaming water; then, unable to control himself, he got up, stole in the darkness through the lobby into the kitchen, where it was black and hot as in a heated stove, and groped, stretching his arms forwards, for the plank bed on which slept the cook, a beggarly lass without kith or kin[80] and reputed to be a simpleton, and she, in terror, did not even cry out. After that he slept with her the whole summer and fathered a boy, who duly began growing up with his mother in the kitchen. The deacon, the deacon’s wife, the priest himself and the whole of his house, the whole of the shopkeeper’s family and the village constable and his wife, they all knew whose this boy was – and the seminarist, coming to stay for the holidays, could not see him for bad-tempered shame over his own past: he had slept with the simpleton!

When he graduated – “brilliantly!” as the deacon told everyone – and again came to stay with his parents for the summer before entering the academy, they invited guests for tea on the very first holy day to show off before them their pride in the future academy student. The guests also spoke of his brilliant future, drank tea, ate various jams, and in the midst of their animated conversation the happy deacon wound up a gramophone that began to hiss and then shout loudly. All had fallen silent and started listening with smiles of pleasure to the rousing sounds of ‘Along the Roadway’[81], when suddenly into the room, beginning to dance and stamp, clumsily and out of time, there flew the cook’s boy, to whom his mother, thinking to touch everyone with him, had stupidly whispered: “Run and have a dance, little one.” The unexpectedness bewildered everyone, but the deacon’s son, turning crimson, threw himself upon him like a tiger and flung him out of the room with such force that the boy rolled into the entrance hall like a peg top[82].

The next day, at his demand, the deacon and the deacon’s wife gave the cook the sack[83]. They were kind and compassionate people and had grown very accustomed to her, had grown to love her for her meekness and obedience, and they asked their son in all sorts of ways to be charitable. But he remained adamant, and they did not dare disobey him. Towards evening, quietly crying and holding in one hand her bundle and in the other the little hand of the boy, the cook left the yard.

All summer after that she went around the villages and hamlets with him, begging for alms. She wore out her clothes, grew shabby, was baked in the wind and sun, became nothing but skin and bone, but was tireless. She walked bare-footed, with a sackcloth bag over her shoulder, propping herself up with a tall stick, and in the villages and hamlets bowed silently before every hut. The boy walked behind her with a bag over his little shoulder too, wearing her old shoes, battered and hardened like the down-at-heel things that lie about somewhere in a gully.

He was ugly. The crown of his head was large, flat and covered with the red hair of a boar, his little nose was squashed flat and had wide nostrils, his eyes were nut brown and very shiny. But when he smiled he was very sweet.

28th September 1940