The Cossacks (22 page)

The following night his sergeant major woke him up, for the company had been ordered to set out immediately on a sortie. Olenin was relieved, and considered not coming back to the village anymore. The sortie lasted four days. Afterward, the commander asked to see Olenin, who was a relation, and suggested that he remain at headquarters. But Olenin declined. He could not live without his village, and asked for permission to return. He was awarded a military cross, which in the past he had longed for but which now left him indifferent. He was even more indifferent about his promotion to officer, the order for which had not yet come. He rode back with Vanyusha a few hours before his company and arrived in the village without incident.

All evening he sat on his porch gazing at Maryanka. All night he paced the yard vacantly and without aim.

The following morning Olenin woke up late. The cornet and his family had already gone to the vineyard. Olenin did not go out hunting but read a little, sat on the porch for a while, and then went back inside to lie down again. Vanyusha wondered if he was ill. In the evening Olenin got up again and began writing late into the night. He wrote a letter that he would not send; as it was, nobody else would understand what he wanted to say, nor was there any point in anyone understanding. This is what he wrote:

Three months have passed from the first time I saw a young Cossack woman by the name of Maryanka. The ideas and prejudices of the world I had left behind were still fresh within me. In those days I did not believe that I could love this woman. I admired her as I admired the beauty of the mountains and the sky, and I could not help admiring her because, like the mountains and the sky, she is beautiful. The sight of her beauty became a necessity in my life, and I began to wonder whether I was not in love with her. But nothing I felt resembled what I had always imagined love to be. What I felt was not like the melancholy of loneliness or the desire for marriage, nor did it resemble platonic love—carnal love even less. I needed to see her, hear her, know that she was close. And if I was not happy, at least I was at peace. After a party at which I spoke to her for the
first time, at which I touched her, I felt that between this woman and myself an indissoluble bond existed, even if unacknowledged, against which I must not struggle. But I did struggle. I asked myself if one can love a woman who will never understand one’s most profound interests. Can one love a woman merely for her beauty, as if she were a statue? I asked myself this though I was already in love with her, even if I did not yet believe in what I was feeling.

After that party our relations changed. Until then I had seen her as a foreign though noble object of nature. After the party, I saw her as a person. I began meeting her, speaking to her, and going to her father’s vineyard. I spent whole evenings visiting at their house. Even in this close proximity she remained in my eyes as pure, unapproachable, and noble as before. She always replied to everything I said with the same calmness and pride, the same lighthearted indifference. There were times when she was friendly, but for the most part every glance, every word, every movement expressed this indifference, which was not contemptuous but overwhelmingly bewitching. Every day, with a forced smile on my lips, I tried to play a role, addressing her playfully while torments of passion and desire raged in my heart. She saw that it was all a sham but looked at me directly and cheerfully. This situation became unbearable. I did not want to lie to her. I wanted to tell her everything I thought, everything I felt. I was so agitated! We were in the vineyard. I began to tell her of my love in words that I am ashamed to remember—ashamed because I should not have dared speak to her like that, for she stands on a far loftier plane than those words or the feelings they express. I said no more, and from that day on my situation has been unbearable. I did not want to debase myself by continuing my previous lightheartedness, and yet I felt that I was not up to a straightforward relationship with her. In desperation I wondered what I should do. In absurd dreams I imagined her as either my mistress or my wife, but I rejected both ideas in disgust. Turning her into a harlot would be terrible. It would be murder. But turning her into a lady, the wife of Dmitri Andreyevich Olenin, like one of the local Cossack women whom our officer married—that would be even worse! If I could become a Cossack like Lukashka, steal herds of horses, drink my comrades under the table, sing wild songs, kill men, and climb drunk through her window to spend the night without a thought about who I am or what I am doing—if I could do that, then it would be another matter. Then she and I would understand one another, and I would be happy. I tried to give myself up to that kind of life, but became even more aware of how weak and ungainly I
am. I could not forget myself and the difficult, discordant past that is so repulsive to me. And I see my future as even more hopeless. Every day I see before me the distant, snow-covered mountains and that happy, noble woman. But there is no possibility in this world for me to be happy. This woman is not for me! What is sweetest and most terrible is that I feel I understand her, but she will never understand me. Not because she is lower than me. Quite the opposite. She simply
must
not understand me. She is happy. She is unruffled, calm, and self-sufficient, like nature. And I, a weak and corrupted being, should want her to understand my repulsiveness and torment? I could not sleep at night but wandered aimlessly beneath her windows, refusing to admit to myself what was happening to me. On the eighteenth, our company rode out on a sortie. I was away from the village for three days. I felt dejected and didn’t care about anything. I found the singing, the cards, the drinking, and the talk of honors in the detachment more revolting than usual. I have just now gotten back, seen her, my house, Uncle Eroshka, seen the snowy mountains from my porch, and was seized by such a powerful new feeling of joy that I understood everything. I love this woman with what for the first and only time in my life is true love. I know what has happened to me. I am not afraid of debasing myself, I am not ashamed of my love but proud of it. I am not to blame for falling in love. It happened against my will. I tried to escape it by selflessness, and tried to find happiness in the love between Maryanka and the Cossack Lukashka, but I only stirred up my own love and jealousy. This is not the kind of ideal, so-called exalted love I felt earlier. It is not the kind of attraction in which you admire your feelings of love and sense that you yourself are generating these feelings, that you are doing everything yourself. I have experienced that too. It is even less the desire for pleasure. It is something entirely different. Perhaps what I love in her is nature, the personification of everything wonderful in nature. Yet I am not acting of my own free will: an elemental force loves her through me, the whole of God’s world, the whole of nature forces this love into my soul and tells me: “Love!” I love her not with my mind, not with my imagination, but with all my being. Loving her, I feel that I am an inseparable part of God’s blissful creation. I wrote earlier of the new conviction that I came to in my solitary life. But nobody will ever know how difficult it was to achieve this conviction, or with what joy I became aware of it and saw a new road opening before me. Nothing was more important to me than this conviction. But then I fell in love, and now this conviction is gone, as are any regrets over it. It is difficult for me even to conceive that I could have
prized such a cold, one-sided way of thinking, Beauty came and scattered to the winds all that laborious, seething inner toil—and I have no regrets! The idea of selflessness is nonsense, rubbish! Selflessness is nothing but pride, an escape from self-imposed misery, a salvation from envying others’ happiness. Live for others, and do good? Why should I, when in my soul there is nothing but love for myself, when all I wish for is to love her and live the life of a Cossack with her? Now I no longer desire happiness for Lukashka or for others. I do not love these others now. Not long ago I would have told myself that this was bad. I would have tortured myself with questions, such as what will become of her, of me, of Lukashka. Now I do not care. Now I do not live of my own accord: something stronger than me is leading me. I am tortured. But in the past I was dead, and it is only now that I am alive. I shall go to her house right away and tell her everything.

After finishing the letter late in the evening, Olenin went to the cornet’s house. Old Ulitka was sitting on the bench behind the stove unwinding silk cocoons, and Maryanka, her head uncovered, was sewing by the light of a candle. Seeing Olenin come in, she jumped up and hurried to the stove, snatching up her kerchief.

“Come here, Maryanka,” her mother said. “You can sit with us.”

“No, my head is bare,” she replied and quickly climbed onto the bench above the stove. Olenin could see only one of her knees and a shapely, dangling calf. He gave the old woman a packet of tea, and she offered him some clotted cream, which she sent Maryanka to get. Maryanka put the bowl of cream on the table and climbed back onto the bench. Olenin felt her eyes peering at him. He and Ulitka spoke about household matters, and Ulitka, carried away by the rough, proud village hospitality of people who come by their bread through hard work, began piling plates of grape preserves and raisin cake onto the table and brought out the best wine. Though her rudeness had shocked Olenin when they first met, he was now increasingly touched by her simple tenderness, especially toward her daughter.

“Why anger God by complaining?” Old Ulitka said. “God be praised, we have everything we need. We’ve pressed our grapes, we’ve
made our preserves, we’ll be selling at least three or four barrels of it, and there’ll still be enough grapes for all our wine. You know, you shouldn’t be thinking of leaving us too soon—we’ll have such fun at the wedding!”

“When’s the wedding going to be?” Olenin asked, feeling the blood suddenly rush to his cheeks, his heart beating irregularly and in agony. He heard the creaking of the bench above the stove and the cracking of pumpkin seeds.

“Next week, if it were up to me. As it is, we’re ready,” the old woman replied simply, as if Olenin were not present, as if he did not exist. “I’ve prepared everything for my Maryanushka. We’ll be handing her over very nicely. But there’s just one thing that isn’t right: Our Lukashka’s been carousing too much lately. Much too much! He’s been up to no good, you know. The other day one of the Cossacks from his squadron said that Lukashka went riding out into Nogai land.”

“He should be careful they don’t catch him,” Olenin said.

“And I told him: ‘Lukashka, you must stop this. We all know what young men are like, but there’s a right time for everything. You’ve done your raiding, you’ve rustled horses, you’ve killed a Chechen fighter—you’ve proven yourself! Now you must settle down, Lukashka,’ I told him, ‘or there’ll be trouble.’”

“Yes,” Olenin said. “I saw him two or three times at our detachment. He’s always carousing, and he’s sold another horse.” He glanced over to the stove, where a pair of dark eyes flashed at him angrily. He felt ashamed for what he had just said.

“So what, he’s not doing anyone any harm,” Maryanka suddenly exclaimed, “and if he’s carousing, it’s his own money.” She lowered her legs from the bench, jumped down, and left the room, slamming the door behind her. He waited, staring at the door, oblivious to what Old Ulitka was saying. A few minutes later an old man, who turned out to be Ulitka’s brother, came in, accompanied by Uncle Eroshka, followed by Ustenka and Maryanka.

“Good evening all,” Ustenka squeaked and then turned to Olenin. “Still enjoying the festival?”