Short Fiction Aleksandr Kuprin (free novel reading sites TXT) 📖

impression⁠—in a word, if relations of this kind can be called love, then I may boldly say that not only I, but each of us has loved the other!

And not even with that love which one calls mockingly “brother’s love.” I know this because I have a very clear recollection of one instance, the one instance at which I am afraid of blushing when I talk about it. It happened on the broken cliff over the sea, in the vineyard summerhouse, which is still called, just as it was last year, with faded sentimentality, “the arbour of love.”

It was a quiet peaceful morning and the sea seemed green with just that alternation of bright and pale green that certain species of malachite have; sometimes over its quiet surface there would creep an uneven purple spot⁠—the shadow of a cloud. I had not slept well the night before and I had got up feeling broken, with a headache and my nerves overstrung. At breakfast I had quarrelled with the doctor, not so much because he had forbidden me to bathe in the open sea as on account of his self-assertive and radiant health. When I complained to you about him in the arbour I burst out crying. Do you remember the incident? You were disconcerted and you were saying disconnected but kind, caressing words, cautiously stroking my head as if I were a child. This sympathy was too much for me, and I leaned my head on your shoulder and then⁠ ⁠… you kissed me again and again on the temple and on the cheek. And I must confess (I knew that I should blush at this part of my letter) that these kisses, not only were not repugnant, but even gave me a pleasant, purely physical pleasure, like the sensation of a light warm wave running over the whole of my body from head to foot.

But this was the only instance of that kind. You, my friend, said more than once that for people like us, exhausted consumptives, chastity was not so much a virtue as a duty.

All the same, this love, gleaming through my sad sunset, was so pure, so tender, so beautiful in its very malady! I remember, when I was quite a little schoolgirl, lying in the infirmary, an enormous, empty, dreadfully high room, lying there for some reason or other, apart from the rest of the sick ones, and being intolerably bored. And then my attention happened to be caught by a simple, but wonderful thing. Beyond the window, in the moss-covered recess⁠—moss grew almost all over the saliences of that old, pre-Catherine wall⁠—a flower had sprouted. It was a real hospital flower, with a corolla like a tiny yellow star and a long, thin, pale green little stalk. I couldn’t tear my eyes from it and felt for it a sort of pitiful, pensive love, My own beloved one, this weak, sick, yellow little flower⁠—it is my love for you.

There, this is all that I wish to tell you. Goodbye. I know that my letter will slightly touch you, and the thought of this pleases me beforehand. For, with a love like this, actually like this, no one has probably ever loved you or ever will love you.⁠ ⁠…

It is true that I have one wish: it is to see you in that mysterious hour when the veil will begin to lift itself from my eyes, not to cling to you in senseless terror, but so that in that moment, when the will weakens, in the moment of involuntary fear which⁠—who knows?⁠—will perhaps seize me, you might press my hand tightly and say to me with your beautiful eyes:

“Courage, my friend⁠—a few more seconds and you will know all.”

But I shall resist this temptation. I shall seal my letter at once, write the address, and you will receive it a few days after I have crossed “the enigmatic border of knowledge.”

My last feeling will be one of deep gratitude to you who have illumined my last days with love. Goodbye. Don’t be anxious about me. I feel well. There, I have closed my eyes, and over my body there runs once more a sweet, warm wave as then⁠—in the vineyard arbour. My head swims so quietly and pleasantly. Goodbye.

The Army Ensign Prologue

Last summer one of my nearest friends inherited from an aunt of his a small farm in the Z⁠⸺ district of the Government of Podol. After looking through the things that had fallen to his lot, he found, in an attic, a huge iron-bound trunk stuffed with old-fashioned books, with the letter “T” printed like a “CH,” from the yellowish leaves of which came a scent of mouldiness, of dried-up flowers, of mice, and of camphor, all blended together. The books were chiefly odd volumes of faded Russian authors of the early nineteenth century, including an epistolary manual and the Book of Solomon. Among this assortment were letters and papers, mostly of a business nature and wholly uninteresting. But one rather thick bundle wrapped up in grey packing paper and tied carefully with a piece of string, roused in my friend a certain curiosity. It proved to contain the diary of an infantry officer, named Lapshine, and several leaves of a beautiful, rough Bristol paper, decorated with irises and covered with a small feminine handwriting. At the end of these pages was the signature “Kate,” but many of them bore the single letter “K.” There could be no doubt that Lapshine’s diary and Kate’s letters were written at about the same time and concerned the same events, which took place some twenty-five years or so ago. Not knowing what to do with his find, my friend posted the package to me. In offering it now to my readers, I must confess that my own pen has dealt only very slightly with it, merely correcting the grammar here and there and obliterating numerous affectations in quotation marks and brackets.