Russian Short Stories - From Pushkin to Buida by Robert Chandler (Editor)

Author:Robert Chandler (Editor)
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Classics, Literary Collections, General, Fiction
ISBN: 9780141910246
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2005-05-26T04:00:00+00:00

LOVE

It was during the wonderful days of my ninth spring – days that were long and saturated with life, full to the brim.

Everything during these days was interesting, important and full of meaning. Things were new and people were wise; they knew an astonishing amount, and they were keeping their great dark secrets until some future date, I didn't know when.

The morning of each long day began joyfully: thousands of small rainbows in the soapy foam of the washing stand; a new brightly-coloured light dress; prayers before the icon, behind which the fresh willow branches were still green; tea on a terrace shaded by lemon trees that had been carried out from the orangery in their tubs; my elder sisters, black-browed and with long plaits of hair, still unsettled, only just back from boarding school for the holidays; the slap of washing-bats from the pond beyond the flower garden, where peasant women shouted to one another as they did their laundry; the languid clucking of hens behind a clump of young, still small-leaved lilac: everything was not only new and joyful in itself but was a promise of something still more new and joyful.

And it was during this ninth spring that first love came into my life, that my first love came, passed by and went away – in all its fullness, with rapture and pain and disappointment, with all that is to be expected of any true love.

Four peasant girls, Khodoska, Paraska, Pidorka and Khovra – all wearing coin necklaces, Ukrainian wraparound skirts and linen shirts with embroidered shoulders – were weeding the garden paths. They scraped and hacked at the fresh black earth with their spades, turning over thick oily sods and tearing away tenacious crackling little roots that were as thin as nerves.

For hours on end, until I was called, I would stand and watch, and breathe in the heavy damp smell of the earth.

Necklaces dangled and clinked, arms red from the first of the sun slid lightly and gaily up and down the spades’ wooden handles.

And then, instead of Khovra, who was fair and stocky, with a thin red band round her head, I saw a new girl – tall and lissom, with narrow hips.

‘Hey, new girl, what's your name?’ I asked.

A dark head encircled by thick four-stranded plaits and with a narrow white parting down the centre, turned towards me, and dark mischievous eyes looked at me from beneath round eyebrows that met in the middle, and a merry red mouth smiled at me.

‘Ganka!’

And her teeth gleamed – even, white and large.

She said her name and laughed, and the other girls laughed, and I felt happy too.

Ganka was astonishing! Why was she laughing? And why did she make me feel so good and happy? She was not as well dressed as smart Paraska, but her thick striped skirt was wound so deftly round her shapely hips, her red woollen sash gripped her waist so firmly and vibrantly and her bright green ribbon trembled so arrestingly by the collar of her shirt that it was hard to imagine anything prettier.

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