A Hero of Our Time - Mikhail IUr'evich Lermontov [39]
“Where’d I go? Went nowhere . . . with a bundle? Which bundle?”
This time the old woman heard, and started to growl: “Listen how they make things up—and about a cripple too! What do you want of him? What has he done to you?”
I was fed up with this and left, solidly resolved to find the key to this mystery.
I wrapped myself up in my felt cloak and sat by the fence on a rock, looking into the distance. The sea extended before me, still agitated from last night’s storm. And its monotonous sound, similar to the murmur of a city falling asleep, reminded me of years past, and carried my thoughts northward to our cold capital city. Disturbed by these reminiscences, I sank into reverie . . . About an hour passed thus, or perhaps more . . . Suddenly, something that sounded like a song struck my ear. Yes, indeed, it was a song, in a fresh, little female voice—but where was it coming from? . . . I listen—the song is strange, sometimes drawn-out and sad, at other times quick and lively. I look around—there is no one anywhere. I listen again. It was as though the sounds were falling from the sky. I looked up: a girl with unruly braids wearing a striped dress was standing on the roof of the peasant house—a veritable rusalka.6 Protecting her eyes from the sun’s rays with her palm, she was peering intently into the distance, either laughing or saying something to herself or singing her song again.
I remember the song, every word of it:
The ships pass,
Their white sails,
Over the green sea
As though by charter free.
My little boat
With two oars,
And no sails, slips
Among those ships.
If a storm strikes up
The old ships
Will raise their wing
Over the sea spreading.
I bow to the sea now
Low very low,
“Menace not this night,
oh sea of spite:
my little boat
with its riches floats
through the dark, blind
with a wild little mind.”
I was unwillingly subject to the thought that I had heard that same voice during the night. I was distracted for a minute, and when I looked up again at the roof, the girl wasn’t there. Suddenly she ran past me, singing something different; and, snapping her fingers, she ran inside to the old woman and they began an argument. The old woman was getting angry and the girl guffawed. And then I saw my water sprite come running back again, skipping along. When she had come up beside me, she stopped and looked me intently in the eye, as if she was astonished by my presence. Then she went off to the jetty, casually and quietly. But that wasn’t the end of the story. She circled my lodgings the whole day. And the singing and skipping didn’t cease. Strange being! There were no signs of lunacy in her face. On the contrary, her eyes settled on me with a spry perspicacity, and those eyes, it seemed, were endowed with some sort of magnetic power; it was as if they were awaiting a question each time they looked at you. But as soon as I started to speak she ran off, smiling craftily.
I have definitely never seen a girl like her. She was far from being a beauty, but then I have prejudices with regard to beauty too. There was a look of breeding to her . . . breeding in women, as in horses, is of great matter. This discovery belongs to La Jeune-France.7 It, beauty that is, not La Jeune-France, is in large part manifested in the gait, in the arms and the legs. The nose is especially telling. A straight nose is rarer in Russia than small feet. My songstress seemed no more than eighteen years old. Her figure had an unusual suppleness to it, she had a particular inclination of the head; she had long light-brown hair, a sort of golden tint to the slightly sun-tanned skin on her neck and her shoulders, and an especially straight nose. All this enchanted me. I read something wild and suspicious in her oblique gaze, and there was something indeterminate in her smile but such is the strength of prejudice: her straight nose had carried me from my senses. I imagined that I had found Goethe’s Mignon,8 the marvelous creation of his German imagination. Certainly there were many similarities: