Malinovka Heights by Ivan Goncharov

Author:Ivan Goncharov
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Alma Books
Published: 2020-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 4

THAT EVENING, Raisky made no further progress. He talked, he dreamt, at one moment he would be fired up by the look in her velvety dark-brown eyes, and a moment later down in the dumps because of the indifference contained in that same look.

He was confronted with a beautiful phenomenon with all the promise of a powerful, painful and frenzied happiness which was not available to him. He had been stripped of the right even to express the wish for it, or to look upon her as anything more than a sister, or some strange woman he didn’t even know.

But that was the way it had to be; he had already agreed to it. If the reason why he was bound to keep his distance from her was because of the purity of her maidenly modesty, and a natural unawareness of evil born of her sheer innocence, as was the case with Marfenka, it would have been easier for him to resign himself to the situation.

Vera, however, could not be credited with unawareness: there was something about her which betrayed if not experience (and he was sure that she had none), and if not knowledge, but rather a premonition of that knowledge and experience, and it was not ignorance, but rather her pride which made her reject his bold glance and efforts to win her affection. It followed, therefore, that she knew the meaning of his passionate looks and his thirst for beauty, what it could lead to, and when and why his obsession could become offensive.

She had somehow discerned and could trace the trajectory of his impressionable imagination and his emotional struggle, and predict its course, even perhaps the dramatic outcome of his passion, and thus understood how drastically it could affect her life as a woman.

This precocious sensitivity is not necessarily the fruit of experience. The ability to predict and anticipate the turns which life will take in the future is a quality of intuitive and observant people in general, but of women in particular, even without the experience to which instinct, a quality possessed by sensitive natures, serves as a precursor.

It prepares them for actual experience by means of clues of various kinds, which go undetected by simpler minds, but are apparent to open and sharper eyes, which in the time it takes for a single flash of lightning to break through the clouds, are capable of taking in the whole area it has illuminated and consigning it to their memory.

And it is eyes such as these that Vera possesses. All she has to do is to take one look at a crowd, in church, in the street, and is immediately able to pick out one given person, just as with a single glance at the Volga, she can take in a ship in one spot, a small boat in another, horses grazing on the island, the men towing a barge, a seagull, and smoke rising from a chimney in a distant village. And her mind is just as keen and sharp as her eyes and misses nothing.

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