A Hero of Our Time - Mikhail IUr'evich Lermontov [51]
Grushnitsky banged his fist on the table and started to pace the room.
I was laughing loudly inside and almost smiled twice, but he, fortunately, didn’t notice this. It was clear that he was in love, because he became even more gullible than before. He even began to wear a silver ring with black enamel, made locally. It seemed a little dubious to me . . . I started to scrutinize it and what did I see? . . . Engraved on the inside in tiny letters, was the name “Mary,” and next to it, the date of the day she picked up the famous glass. I hid my discovery. I don’t want to force a confession from him. I want him to choose me as a confidante, and then I will really enjoy it . . .
Today I was up late; I arrived at the well—and no one was there anymore. The day began to get hot. White, shaggy rain clouds quickly sped down from the snowy mountains, promising a storm. The head of Mount Mashuk was smoking like an extinguished torch. Gray shreds of cloud twisted and crawled around it, like snakes, and they seemed to be held back in their strivings, as if they had been caught up in its prickly shrubbery. The air was filled with electricity. I went deep into the grapevine alley that led to a grotto; I was melancholy. I was thinking about the young woman whom the doctor had mentioned, with the mole on her cheek . . . Why is she here? Is it she? And why do I think that it is she? And why am I even convinced of it? Are women with moles on their cheeks so very rare? Thinking in this way, I walked right up to the grotto and looked: on a stone bench in the cool shadows of its entrance, a woman was sitting, wrapped in a black shawl, wearing a straw hat, with her head lowered onto her chest. The hat covered her face. I wanted to turn, in order not to ruin her daydreaming, when she caught sight of me.
“Vera!” I exclaimed involuntarily.
She shuddered and went pale.
“I knew you were here,” she said.
I sat next to her and took her hand. A long forgotten feeling of awe ran along my veins at the sound of this sweet voice. She looked me in the eyes with her deep and peaceful eyes. They expressed mistrust and something like reproach.
“We haven’t seen each other in a long while,” I said.
“A long time, and we have both changed in many ways!”
“I assume you don’t love me anymore?”
“I am married!” she said.
“Again? But this reason also existed a few years ago, and yet . . .”
She pulled her hand out of mine, and her cheeks blazed.
“Maybe you love your second husband?”
She didn’t answer and turned away.
“Or he is very jealous?”
Silence.
“Well? He is young, handsome, special, faithful, rich, and you are afraid . . .”
I looked at her and became scared: her face expressed deep despair; tears were sparkling in her eyes.
“Tell me,” she finally whispered, “is it fun for you to torture me? . . . I should really hate you. Ever since we have known each other, you have given me nothing but suffering . . .” Her voice trembled, she leaned toward me, and lowered her head onto my breast.
“Perhaps,” I thought, “this is exactly why you loved me: joys are forgotten, but sadness, never . . .”
I hugged her tightly and we stayed like that for a long time. Finally, our lips approached each other and merged into a hot, intoxicating kiss. Her hands were as cold as ice, and her head was burning. Then one of those conversations started up between us, which don’t make any sense on paper, which you can’t repeat, and which you can’t even remember. The meanings of the sounds replace and add to the meanings of the words, as in an Italian opera.
She absolutely doesn’t want me to be introduced to her husband—the limping little old man whom I saw in passing on the boulevard. She married him for her son’s sake. He is rich and suffers from rheumatism. I didn’t allow myself to make even one mockery of him: she respects him, like a father—and will deceive him like a husband . . . It is a strange thing the human heart in general—and the female one in particular!
Vera’s husband, Semyon