Vera Iosifovna had long been suffering from migraine but recently, when Pussycat had been scaring her every day by threatening to go off to the Conservatoire, the attacks had become much more frequent. Every doctor in town called on the Turkins, until finally it was the district doctor’s turn. Vera Iosifovna wrote him a touching letter, begging him to come and relieve her sufferings. So Startsev went and subsequently became a very frequent visitor at the Turkins’ – very frequent. In point of fact, he did help Vera Iosifovna a little and she told all her friends that he was an exceptional, a truly wonderful doctor. But it was no longer the migraine that brought Startsev to the Turkins’.
He had the day off. Yekaterina Ivanovna finished her interminable, tiresome piano exercises, after which they all sat in the dining-room for a long time drinking tea, while Ivan Petrovich told one of his funny stories. But then the front door bell rang and Ivan Petrovich had to go into the hall to welcome some new visitor. Startsev took advantage of the momentary distraction and whispered to Yekaterina Ivanovna in great agitation:
‘Don’t torment me, for Christ’s sake. I beg you! Let’s go into the garden.’
She shrugged her shoulders as if at a loss to understand what he wanted from her; still, she got up and went out.
‘You usually play the piano for three or four hours at a time,’ he said as he followed her, ‘then you sit with your mama, so I have no chance to talk to you. Please spare me a mere quarter of an hour. I beg you!’
Autumn was approaching and all was quiet and sad in the old garden; dark leaves lay thick on the paths. Already the evenings were drawing in.
‘I haven’t seen you the whole week,’ Startsev continued. ‘If you only knew what hell I’ve been through! Let’s sit down. Please listen to what I have to say.’
Both of them had their favourite spot in the garden – the bench under the broad, old maple. And now they sat down on this bench.
‘What do you want?’ Yekaterina Ivanovna asked in a dry, matter-of-fact tone.
‘I haven’t seen you the whole week. It’s been so long since I heard you speak. I passionately want to hear your voice, I thirst for it! Please speak.’
She captivated him by her freshness, by that naïve expression of her eyes and cheeks. Even in the way she wore her dress he saw something exceptionally charming, touching in its simplicity and innocent grace. And at the same time, despite her naïveté, she struck him as extremely intelligent and mature for her age. With someone like her he could discuss literature, art – anything he liked in fact; he could complain to her about life, about people, although during serious conversations she would sometimes suddenly start laughing quite inappropriately and run back to the house. Like almost all the young ladies of S— she read a great deal (on the whole the people of S— read very little and they said in the local library that if it weren’t for girls and young Jews they might as well close the place down). This pleased Startsev immeasurably and every time they met he would excitedly ask her what she had been reading over the past few days and he would listen enchanted when she told him.
‘What did you read that week we didn’t meet?’ he asked her now. ‘Tell me, I beg you.’
‘I read Pisemsky.’
‘And what precisely?’
‘A Thousand Souls,’ Pussycat replied. ‘And what a funny name Pisemsky had: Aleksey Feofilaktych!’
‘But where are you going?’ Startsev cried out in horror when she suddenly got up and went towards the house. ‘I must talk to you … there’s something I must explain … Please stay, for just five minutes! I implore you!’
She stopped as if she wanted to say something. Then she awkwardly thrust a little note into his hand and ran off into the house, where she sat down at the piano again.
‘Be at the cemetery tonight at eleven o’clock by the Demetti tomb,’ read Startsev.
‘Well, that’s really rather silly,’ he thought, collecting himself. ‘Why the cemetery? What for?’
Pussycat was obviously playing one of her little games. Who in their right mind would want to arrange a rendezvous at night in a cemetery, miles from town, when they could easily have met in the street or the municipal park? And did it become him, a district doctor, an intelligent, respectable person, to be sighing, receiving billets-doux, hanging around cemeteries, doing things so silly that even schoolboys would laugh at them these days! What would his colleagues say if they found out?
These were Startsev’s thoughts as he wandered around the tables at the club. But at half past ten he suddenly upped and went to the cemetery.
He now had his own carriage and pair – and a coachman called Panteleymon, who wore a velvet waistcoat. The moon was shining. It was quiet and warm but autumn was in the air. Near the abattoirs in one of the suburbs dogs were howling. Startsev left his carriage in a lane on the edge of town and walked the rest of the way to the cemetery. ‘Everyone has his peculiar side,’ he thought. ‘Pussycat’s rather weird too and – who knows? – perhaps she’s not joking and she’ll turn up.’ And he surrendered to this feeble, vain hope – and it intoxicated him.
For a quarter of a mile he walked over the fields. The cemetery appeared in the distance as a dark strip – like a forest or large garden. The white stone wall, the gates came into view … In the moonlight he could read on the gates: ‘The hour is coming when …’ Startsev passed through a wicket-gate and what first caught his eye were the white crosses and tombstones on either side of a wide avenue and the black shadows cast by them and the poplars. All around, far and wide, he could see black and white, and the sleepy trees lowered their branches over the white beneath them. It seemed lighter here than in the open fields. The paw-like leaves of the maples stood out sharply against the yellow sand of the avenues and against the gravestones, while inscriptions on monuments were clearly visible. Immediately Startsev was struck by what he was seeing for the first time in his life and what he would probably never see again: a world that was unlike any other, a world where the moonlight was so exquisite and soft it seemed to have its cradle here; a world where there was no life – no, not one living thing – but where, in every dark poplar, in every grave, one sensed the presence of some secret that promised peaceful, beautiful, eternal life. From those stones and faded flowers, mingling with the smell of autumnal leaves, there breathed forgiveness, sadness and peace.
All around was silence. The stars looked down from the heavens in profound humility and Startsev’s footsteps rang out so sharply, so jarringly here. Only when the chapel clock began to strike and he imagined himself dead and buried here for ever did he have the feeling that someone was watching him and for a minute he thought that here was neither peace nor tranquillity, only the mute anguish of non-existence, of stifled despair …
Demetti’s tomb was in the form of a shrine surmounted by an angel. An Italian opera company had once passed through S— and one of the female singers had died. She had been buried here and they had erected this monument. No longer was she remembered in town, but the lamp over the entrance to the shrine reflected the moonlight and seemed to be burning.
No one was there. And how could anyone think of coming here at midnight? But Startsev waited – and as if the moonlight were kindling his desires he waited passionately, imagining kisses and embraces. He sat by the monument for about half an hour, then he wandered along side-paths, hat in hand, waiting and reflecting how many women and young girls who had once been beautiful and enchanting, who had loved and burnt at night with passion, who had yielded to caresses, lay buried here. And in effect, what a terrible joke Nature plays on man – and how galling to be conscious of it!