From the Memoirs of an Idealist

On the tenth of May I took a leave of twenty-eight days, talked our treasurer into a hundred rubles in advance, and resolved that, come what might, I would “have a life” – would live it up to the very hilt, so that afterward, for ten years running, I should have nothing to live on but the memory of it.

And do you know what it means to “have a life,” in the best sense of the phrase? It does not mean going off to a summer theater for an operetta, eating a late supper, and coming home tipsy toward morning. It does not mean going to an exhibition and from there to the races, to flash your purse about near the totalizator. If you want to have a life, get on a train and go where the air is steeped in the scent of lilac and bird cherry, where lilies of the valley and evening primroses vie with each other in bloom, delighting your eye with their tender whiteness and the gleam of diamond dew. There, in the open, under the blue vault of sky, with a green wood and cooing brooks in view, in the company of birds and green beetles, you will understand what life is! Add to that two or three encounters with a wide-brimmed little hat, quick little eyes, and a white little apron... I confess it was all this I dreamed of when, leave in my pocket and warmed by the treasurer’s bounty, I moved out to my summer place.

I rented the dacha, on a friend’s advice, from Sofya Pavlovna Knigina, who let out, at her own summer place, a spare room with board, furniture, and every other convenience. The hiring of the dacha was accomplished sooner than I could have thought. Having arrived at Pererva and found Knigina’s dacha, I climbed, I remember, onto the terrace and... grew flustered. The little terrace was cozy, sweet, and delightful, but sweeter and (if I may put it so) cozier still was the plump young lady sitting at the table on the terrace, drinking tea. She narrowed her eyes at me.

“What can I do for you?”

“Excuse me, please...” I began. “I... I must have come to the wrong place... I’m looking for Knigina’s dacha...”

“I am Knigina. What can I do for you?”

I was at a loss... I was used to thinking of landladies of apartments and dachas as elderly persons, rheumatic, smelling of coffee grounds, but here – “save us, o cherubim of heaven!” as Hamlet says – sat a wondrous, magnificent, astonishing, enchanting creature. Stammering, I explained what I needed.

“Ah, how pleasant! Do sit down, please! Your friend already wrote to me about it. Won’t you have some tea? With cream or with lemon?”

There is a breed of women (most often blondes) with whom it is enough to sit two or three minutes to feel yourself at home, as though you had known one another for ages. Such precisely was Sofya Pavlovna. By the time I had finished my first glass, I already knew that she was unmarried, that she lived on the interest from her capital, and that she was expecting her aunt for a visit; I knew the reasons that had led Sofya Pavlovna to let a room. In the first place, paying a hundred and twenty rubles for the dacha alone was hard going, and in the second, it was somehow frightening: what if a thief broke in at night, or some terrible peasant walked in by day! And there was nothing improper in having some solitary lady or gentleman living in the corner room.

“But a gentleman is better!” sighed my hostess, licking jam from her little spoon. “With a gentleman there’s less bother, and it’s not so frightening...”

In a word, within some hour or so, Sofya Pavlovna and I were already friends.

“Ah, yes!” I remembered, as I was taking my leave of her. “We’ve talked about everything, and not a word about the main thing. How much will you take from me? I shall only be staying with you twenty-eight days... Dinner, of course... tea and so on...”

“Now, what a thing to talk about! Give what you can... I’m not letting the room for the money, after all, just... so it shouldn’t be so lonely... Could you manage twenty-five rubles?”

I agreed, of course, and my dacha life began... This life is remarkable in that one day is like the next, one night like the next, and – what charm there is in that sameness, what days, what nights! Reader, I am in raptures – allow me to embrace you! In the morning I would wake and, giving not the slightest thought to my office, drink tea with cream. At eleven I would go to my hostess to wish her good morning and drink coffee with her, thick scalded cream and all. From coffee to dinner we would chat. At two o’clock, dinner – but what a dinner! Imagine yourself, hungry as a dog, sitting down at the table, seizing a large glass of home-brewed vodka, and taking a bite of hot corned beef with horseradish. Then imagine cold kvass soup, or green cabbage soup with sour cream, and so on and so forth. After dinner, untroubled lying about, reading a novel, and jumping up every other minute, since the hostess kept flitting past the door – “lie still! lie still!” Then bathing. In the evening, until late into the night, a walk with Sofya Pavlovna... Imagine that in the evening hour, when everything sleeps except the nightingale and the occasional shrieking heron, when the faintly breathing breeze barely carries to you the sound of a distant train, you are strolling in the grove or along the railway embankment with a plump little blonde who shivers coquettishly in the evening chill and keeps turning toward you a little face pale in the moonlight... Terribly good!

Not a week had passed before there happened that which you, reader, have long been expecting of me, and without which no decent story can do... I did not hold out... Sofya Pavlovna heard my declarations indifferently, almost coldly, as though she had long been expecting them, only making a sweet little grimace with her lips, as if wishing to say:

“What is there to talk about at such length, I don’t understand!”

_____________

Twenty-eight days flashed by like a single second. When the term of my leave came to an end, I, sorrowing and unsatisfied, said goodbye to the dacha and to Sonya. My hostess, while I packed my trunk, sat on the divan wiping her eyes. I, myself all but in tears, comforted her, promising to visit her at the dacha on holidays and to call on her in Moscow in the winter.

“Ah... but when, my dear, shall we settle up?” I remembered. “How much do I owe you?”

“Some other time...” my “beloved” brought out, sobbing.

“Why some other time? Friendship is friendship, but money’s another matter, as the saying goes, and besides, I have no wish at all to live at your expense. Don’t be difficult, Sonya... How much?”

“It’s... some trifle or other...” the hostess brought out, sobbing and pulling a little drawer out of the desk. “You might have paid afterward...”

Sonya rummaged in the drawer, took out a slip of paper, and handed it to me.

“Is this the bill?” I asked. “Well, splendid... splendid...” (I put on my spectacles) “let’s settle up and be done...” (I ran my eye down the bill). “Total... Wait, what’s this? Total... But this isn’t right, Sonya! Here it says ‘total, 212 rubles, 44 kopecks.’ This isn’t my bill!”

“It is yours, Dudochka! Just look!”

“But... where does all this come from? For the dacha and board, twenty-five rubles – agreed... For the servant, three rubles – well, all right, I agree to that too...”

“I don’t understand, Dudochka,” the hostess said in a drawn-out voice, glancing at me in surprise with tear-stained eyes. “Surely you don’t distrust me? Reckon it up yourself, then! You drank the vodka... I could hardly have served you spirits at dinner for the price of nothing! Cream for your tea and coffee... then strawberries, cucumbers, cherries... There’s the coffee too... You never agreed to drink it, and yet you drank it every day! Still, all that is such a trifle that I’ll gladly knock off twelve rubles for you. Let it be only two hundred.”

“But... here it says seventy-five rubles, and it isn’t marked what for... What is that for?”

“What do you mean, what for? Well, that’s charming!”

I looked into her little face. It looked so sincere, so clear and astonished, that my tongue could no longer bring itself to utter a single word. I gave Sonya a hundred rubles and a promissory note for the same amount, hoisted my trunk onto my shoulders, and set off for the station.

Might there not be, gentlemen, someone who could lend me a hundred rubles?

Notes