In Moscow, on the Arbat, mysterious love meetings take place, and the married lady comes rarely and not for long, suspecting that her husband guesses and is watching her. Finally, they agree to leave together for the Black Sea coast in the same train for 3-4 weeks. The plan succeeds and they leave. Knowing that her husband will follow, she gives him two addresses in Gelendzhik and Gagra, but they do not stop there, but hide in another place, enjoying love. The husband, not finding her at any address, locks himself in a hotel room and shoots himself in whiskey from two pistols at once.
No longer a young hero lives in Moscow. He has money, but he suddenly decides to study painting and he even has some success. One day, a girl unexpectedly comes to his apartment, who introduces herself as the Muse. She says she heard about him interesting person and wants to meet him. After a short conversation and tea, Muse suddenly kisses him for a long time on the lips and says - today it’s no longer possible, until the day after tomorrow. From that day on, they already lived as newlyweds, were always together. In May, he moved to an estate near Moscow, she constantly went to him, and in June she moved completely and began to live with him. Zavistovsky, a local landowner, often visited them. One day the main character came from the city, but there is no Muse. I decided to go to Zavistovsky, to complain that she was not there. When he came to him, he was surprised to find her there. Coming out of the landowner's bedroom, she said - it's all over, the scenes are useless. Shaking, he went home.
Ivan Alekseevich Bunin
Late hour
Oh, how long have I been there, I said to myself. From the age of nineteen. He once lived in Russia, felt it as his own, had complete freedom to travel anywhere, and it was not great work to travel some three hundred miles. But he didn’t go, he put everything off. And years and decades went by. But now it is no longer possible to postpone any longer: either now or never. It is necessary to use the only and last opportunity, since the hour is late and no one will meet me.
And I went over the bridge over the river, seeing far away in the moonlight of the July night.
The bridge was so familiar, the old one, as if I had seen it yesterday: rudely ancient, humpbacked and as if not even stone, but some kind of petrified from time to time to eternal invincibility - I thought as a schoolboy that he was still under Batu. However, only some traces of the city walls on the cliff under the cathedral and this bridge speak of the antiquity of the city. Everything else is old, provincial, nothing more. One thing was strange, one thing indicated that, after all, something had changed in the world since I was a boy, a young man: before the river was not navigable, but now it must have been deepened and cleared; the moon was to my left, quite far above the river, and in its shaky light and in the flickering, trembling brilliance of the water, the paddle steamer was white, which seemed empty - it was so silent - although all its portholes were lit, like motionless golden eyes and everything was reflected in the water with streaming golden pillars: the steamer stood exactly on them. It was in Yaroslavl, and in the Suez Canal, and on the Nile. In Paris, the nights are damp, dark, a hazy glow turns pink in the impenetrable sky, the Seine flows under the bridges with black tar, but under them, too, streaming pillars of reflections from the lanterns on the bridges hang, only they are tricolor: white, blue, red - Russian national flags. There are no lights on the bridge here, and it is dry and dusty. And ahead, on a hillock, the city darkens with gardens, a fire tower sticks out above the gardens. My God, what an inexpressible happiness it was! It was during the night fire that I kissed your hand for the first time and you squeezed mine in response - I will never forget this secret consent. The whole street was black with people in an ominous, unusual illumination. I was visiting you when the alarm suddenly sounded and everyone rushed to the windows, and then behind the gate. It burned far away, beyond the river, but terribly hot, greedily, hastily. Clouds of smoke were thickly pouring down there in a black-purple rune, and red cloths of flame escaped high from them, near us, trembling, they shivered coppery in the dome of Michael the Archangel. And in the cramped quarters, in the crowd, amid the anxious, now pitiful, now joyful conversation of the common people who had come running from everywhere, I heard the smell of your girlish hair, neck, canvas dress - and then suddenly I made up my mind, took, freezing, your hand ...
Behind the bridge, I climbed the hill, went to the city by a paved road.
There was not a single fire anywhere in the city, not a single living soul. Everything was silent and spacious, calm and sad - the sadness of the Russian steppe night, the sleeping steppe city. Some gardens barely audibly, carefully fluttered their leaves from the even current of a weak July wind, which pulled from somewhere in the fields, gently blew on me. I walked - the big moon also walked, rolling and passing through the blackness of the branches in a mirrored circle; the broad streets lay in shadow—only in the houses to the right, to which the shadow did not reach, white walls were lit and black windows shimmered with a mournful sheen; and I walked in the shade, stepped on the spotty pavement - it was translucently covered with black silk lace. She had such Evening Dress, very elegant, long and slender. It unusually went to her thin figure and black young eyes. She was mysterious in him and insultingly paid no attention to me. Where was it? Visiting who?
End of introductory segment.
Text provided by LitRes LLC.
You can safely pay for the book with a Visa, MasterCard, Maestro bank card, from an account mobile phone, from a payment terminal, in the MTS or Svyaznoy salon, via PayPal, WebMoney, Yandex.Money, QIWI Wallet, bonus cards or in another way convenient for you.
LATE HOUR
Oh, how long have I been there, I said to myself. From the age of nineteen. He once lived in Russia, felt it as his own, had complete freedom to travel anywhere, and it was not great work to travel some three hundred miles. But he didn’t go, he put everything off. And years and decades went by. But now it is no longer possible to postpone any longer: either now or never. It is necessary to use the only and last opportunity, since the hour is late and no one will meet me. And I went over the bridge over the river, seeing far away in the moonlight of the July night. The bridge was so familiar, the old one, as if I had seen it yesterday: crudely ancient, humpbacked and as if not even made of stone, but some kind of petrified from time to time to eternal indestructibility - I thought as a high school student that he was still under Batu. However, only some traces of the city walls on the cliff under the cathedral and this bridge speak of the antiquity of the city. Everything else is old, provincial, nothing more. One thing was strange, one thing indicated that, after all, something had changed in the world since I was a boy, a young man: before the river was not navigable, but now it must have been deepened and cleared; the moon was to my left, quite far above the river, and in its shaky light and in the flickering, quivering gleam of the water, the paddle steamer was white, which seemed empty - so silent it was - although all its portholes were lit, like motionless golden eyes and everything was reflected in the water with streaming golden pillars: the steamer stood exactly on them. It was in Yaroslavl, and in the Suez Canal, and on the Nile. In Paris, the nights are damp, dark, a hazy glow turns pink in the impenetrable sky, the Seine flows under the bridges with black pitch, but under them, too, streaming pillars of reflections from the lanterns on the bridges hang, only they are tricolor: white, blue and red - Russian national flags.
There are no lights on the bridge here, and it is dry and dusty. And ahead, on a hillock, the city darkens with gardens, a fire tower sticks out above the gardens. My God, what an inexpressible happiness it was! It was during the night fire that I kissed your hand for the first time and you squeezed mine in response - I will never forget this secret consent. The whole street was black with people in an ominous, unusual illumination. I was visiting you when the alarm suddenly sounded and everyone rushed to the windows, and then behind the gate. It burned far away, beyond the river, but terribly hot, greedily, hastily. Clouds of smoke were thickly pouring down there in a black-purple rune, and red cloths of flame escaped high from them, near us, trembling, they shivered coppery in the dome of Michael the Archangel. And in the cramped quarters, in the crowd, amid the anxious, now pitiful, now joyful conversation of the common people who had come running from everywhere, I heard the smell of your girlish hair, neck, canvas dress - and then suddenly I decided, I took, all fading, your hand ... Behind the bridge I climbed the hill, went to the city by a paved road. There was not a single fire anywhere in the city, not a single living soul. Everything was mute and spacious, calm and sad—the sadness of a Russian steppe night, a sleeping city of the steppe. Some gardens barely audibly, carefully fluttered their leaves from the even current of a weak July wind, which pulled from somewhere in the fields, gently blew on me. I walked - the big moon also walked, rolling and passing through the blackness of the branches in a mirrored circle; the wide streets lay in shadow—only in the houses to the right, to which the shadow did not reach, were the white walls lit up and the black panes shimmered with a mournful sheen; and I walked in the shade, stepped on the spotty pavement - it was translucently covered with black silk lace. She had such an evening dress, very elegant, long and slender. It unusually went to her thin figure and black young eyes. She was mysterious in him and insultingly paid no attention to me. Where was it? Visiting whom? My goal was to visit Old Street. And I could go there by a different, middle way. But I turned into these spacious streets in the gardens because I wanted to look at the gymnasium. And, having reached it, he again wondered: and here everything remained the same as half a century ago; a stone fence, a stone yard, a large stone building in the yard—everything is just as bureaucratic, boring as it used to be in my time. I hesitated at the gate, I wanted to evoke sadness in myself, the pity of memories - and I could not: yes, a first grader with a comb-cut hair in a brand new blue cap with silver palms over the visor and in a new overcoat with silver buttons entered these gates, then a thin young man in a gray jacket and smart drawstring trousers; but is it me? The old street seemed to me only a little narrower than it seemed before. Everything else was unchanged. A bumpy pavement, not a single tree, dusty merchants' houses on both sides, the sidewalks are also bumpy, such that it is better to walk in the middle of the street, in full moonlight ... And the night was almost the same as that one. Only that one was at the end of August, when the whole city smells of apples, which lie in mountains in the markets, and it is so warm that it was a pleasure to walk in one blouse, belted with a Caucasian strap ... Is it possible to remember this night somewhere there, as if in heaven? Still, I did not dare to go to your house. And he, it is true, has not changed, but it is all the more terrible to see him. Some strangers, new people live in it now. Your father, your mother, your brother - all outlived you, young, but also died in their time. Yes, and I have all died; and not only relatives, but also many, many with whom I, in friendship or friendship, began life, how long ago did they begin, confident that there would be no end to it, and everything began, flowed and ended before my eyes, - so fast and before my eyes! And I sat down on a pedestal near some merchant's house, impregnable behind its castles and gates, and began to think what it was like in those distant, our times: just tied up dark hair, a clear look, a light tan of a young face, a light summer a dress under which the purity, strength and freedom of a young body ... It was the beginning of our love, a time of still unshadowed happiness, intimacy, gullibility, enthusiastic tenderness, joy ... There is something very special in the warm and bright nights of Russian county towns at the end of summer. What a world, what prosperity! An old man with a mallet wanders around the night cheerful city, but only for his own pleasure: there is nothing to guard, sleep peacefully, kind people, you are guarded by God's favor, this high shining sky, at which the old man carelessly glances, wandering along the pavement heated during the day and only occasionally, for fun, launching a dance trill with a mallet. And on such a night, on that late hour when he was the only one who did not sleep in the city, you were waiting for me in your garden, which had already dried up by autumn, and I secretly slipped into it: I quietly opened the gate, unlocked by you in advance, quietly and quickly ran around the yard and behind the barn in the back of the yard I entered the motley twilight of the garden, where your dress was faintly white in the distance, on a bench under the apple trees, and, quickly approaching, met with joyful fright the gleam of your waiting eyes. And we sat, sat in some bewilderment of happiness. With one hand I hugged you, hearing the beating of your heart, in the other I held your hand, feeling through it all of you. And it was already so late that not even a beater could be heard - the old man lay down somewhere on a bench and dozed off with a pipe in his teeth, basking in the moonlight. When I looked to the right, I saw how high and sinlessly the moon was shining above the yard, and the roof of the house was shining like a fish. When he looked to the left, he saw a path overgrown with dry herbs, disappearing under other apple trees, and behind them a lone green star peering low from behind some other garden, glimmering impassively and at the same time expectantly, saying something soundlessly. But I saw only a glimpse of the courtyard and the star - there was only one thing in the world: a slight twilight and a radiant flicker of your eyes in the twilight. And then you walked me to the gate, and I said: - If there is future life and we will meet in it, I will kneel there and kiss your feet for everything that you gave me on earth. I went out into the middle of a bright street and went to my courtyard. Turning around, I saw that it was still turning white in the gate. Now, having risen from the pedestal, I went back the way I had come. No, besides Old Street, I also had another goal, which I was afraid to admit to myself, but the fulfillment of which, I knew, was inevitable. And I went to take a look and leave forever. The road was familiar again. Everything is straight, then to the left, along the bazaar, and from the bazaar - along Monastyrskaya - to the exit from the city. The bazaar is, as it were, another city in the city. Very smelly rows. In Glutton Row, under awnings above long tables and benches, gloomy. In Skobyan, an icon of the big-eyed Savior in a rusty setting hangs on a chain over the middle of the aisle. In Flour in the morning they always ran, pecking on the pavement with a whole flock of pigeons. You go to the gymnasium - how many of them! And all the fat ones, with iridescent goiters, peck and run, feminine, pinch wagging, swaying, monotonously twitching their heads, as if not noticing you: they take off, whistling their wings, only when you almost step on one of them. And at night, large dark rats, ugly and scary, rushed about here quickly and preoccupiedly. City of dead. In Paris, for two days, a house number such and such on such and such a street stands out from all other houses with a plague props of the entrance, its mourning frame with silver, for two days lies in the entrance on the mourning cover of the table a piece of paper in a mourning border - they sign on it as a sign of sympathy polite visitors; then, in some deadline, stops at the entrance of a huge, with a mourning canopy, a chariot, the tree of which is black and resinous, like a plague coffin, the rounded carved floors of the canopy testify to the heavens with large white stars, and the corners of the roof are crowned with curly black sultans - ostrich feathers from the underworld; tall monsters in charcoal horned blankets with white rings of eye sockets are harnessed to the chariot; an old drunkard sits on infinitely high goats and waits to be carried out, also symbolically dressed in a fake coffin uniform and the same triangular hat, internally, he must always be grinning at these solemn words: Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis. - Everything is different here. A breeze blows from the fields along Monastyrskaya, and they carry it towards him on towels open coffin, a rice face sways with a motley halo on its forehead, above closed convex eyelids. So they carried her. At the exit, to the left of the highway, there is a monastery from the time of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, fortified, always closed gates and fortress walls, because of which the gilded turnips of the cathedral shine. Further, quite in the field, there is a very spacious square of other walls, but not high: they contain a whole grove, broken by intersecting long avenues, on the sides of which, under old elms, lindens and birches, everything is dotted with various crosses and monuments. Here the gates were wide open, and I saw the main avenue, smooth, endless. I timidly took off my hat and entered. How late and how mute! The moon was already low behind the trees, but everything around, as far as the eye could see, was still clearly visible. The whole space of this grove of the dead, its crosses and monuments, was patterned in a transparent shade. The wind died down by the predawn hour - light and dark spots, all dazzling under the trees, were asleep. In the distance of the grove, behind the cemetery church, something suddenly flashed and with furious speed, a dark ball rushed at me - I, beside myself, shied to the side, my whole head immediately froze and tightened, my heart jerked and sank .. . What was it? It passed and disappeared. But the heart in the chest remained standing. And so, with a stopped heart, carrying it in me like a heavy cup, I moved on. I knew where I had to go, I kept walking straight along the avenue - and at the very end of it, already a few steps from the back wall, I stopped: in front of me, on level ground, among dry grasses, an elongated and rather narrow stone lay alone, heading to the wall. From behind the wall, a small green star looked like a wondrous gem, radiant, like the former one, but mute, motionless.
LATE HOUR
Oh, how long have I been there, I said to myself. From the age of nineteen. He once lived in Russia, felt it as his own, had complete freedom to travel anywhere, and it was not great work to travel some three hundred miles. But he didn’t go, he put everything off. And years and decades went by. But now it is no longer possible to postpone any longer: either now or never. It is necessary to use the only and last opportunity, since the hour is late and no one will meet me.
And I went over the bridge over the river, seeing far away in the moonlight of the July night.
The bridge was so familiar, the old one, as if I had seen it yesterday: rudely ancient, humpbacked and as if not even stone, but some kind of petrified from time to time to eternal invincibility - I thought as a schoolboy that he was still under Batu. However, only some traces of the city walls on the cliff under the cathedral and this bridge speak of the antiquity of the city. Everything else is old, provincial, nothing more. One thing was strange, one thing indicated that, after all, something had changed in the world since I was a boy, a young man: before the river was not navigable, but now it must have been deepened and cleared; the moon was to my left, quite far above the river, and in its shaky light and in the shimmering, quivering gleam of the water, the paddle steamer was white, which seemed empty - it was so silent - although all its portholes were lit, like motionless golden eyes and everything was reflected in the water with streaming golden pillars: the steamer stood exactly on them. It was in Yaroslavl, and in the Suez Canal, and on the Nile. In Paris, the nights are damp, dark, a hazy glow turns pink in the impenetrable sky, the Seine flows under the bridges with black tar, but under them, streaming pillars of reflections from the lanterns on the bridges also hang, only they are tricolor: white, blue and red - Russian national flags. There are no lights on the bridge here, and it is dry and dusty. And ahead, on a hillock, the city darkens with gardens, a fire tower sticks out above the gardens. My God, what an inexpressible happiness it was! It was during the night fire that I kissed your hand for the first time and you squeezed mine in response - I will never forget this secret consent. The whole street was black with people in an ominous, unusual illumination. I was visiting you when the alarm suddenly sounded and everyone rushed to the windows, and then behind the gate. It burned far away, beyond the river, but terribly hot, greedily, hastily. Clouds of smoke were thickly pouring down there in a black-purple rune, and red cloths of flame were escaping high from them, near us, trembling, they shivered coppery in the dome of Michael the Archangel. And in the cramped quarters, in the crowd, amid the anxious, now pitiful, now joyful conversation of the common people who had fled from everywhere, I heard the smell of your girlish hair, neck, canvas dress - and then suddenly I made up my mind, took, all fading, your hand ...
Behind the bridge, I climbed the hill, went to the city by a paved road.
There was not a single fire anywhere in the city, not a single living soul. Everything was silent and spacious, calm and sad - the sadness of the Russian steppe night, the sleeping steppe city. Some gardens barely audibly, carefully fluttered their leaves from the even current of a weak July wind, which pulled from somewhere in the fields, gently blew on me. I walked - the big moon also walked, rolling and passing through the blackness of the branches in a mirrored circle; the wide streets lay in shadow - only in the houses to the right, to which the shadow did not reach, white walls were lit and black windows shimmered with a mournful luster; and I walked in the shade, stepped on the spotty pavement - it was translucently covered with black silk lace. She had such an evening dress, very elegant, long and slender. It unusually went to her thin figure and black young eyes. She was mysterious in him and insultingly paid no attention to me. Where was it? Visiting who?
My goal was to visit Old Street. And I could go there by a different, middle way. But I turned into these spacious streets in the gardens because I wanted to look at the gymnasium. And, having reached it, he again wondered: and here everything remained the same as half a century ago; a stone fence, a stone yard, a large stone building in the yard - everything is just as bureaucratic, boring, as it once was with me. I hesitated at the gate, wanted to evoke sadness in myself, the pity of memories - and I couldn’t: yes, a first grader with a comb-cut hair in a brand new blue cap with silver palms over the visor and in a new overcoat with silver buttons entered these gates, then a thin young man in a gray jacket and smart drawstring trousers; but is it me?
The old street seemed to me only a little narrower than it seemed before. Everything else was unchanged. A bumpy pavement, not a single tree, dusty merchants' houses on both sides, the sidewalks are also bumpy, such that it is better to walk in the middle of the street, in full moonlight ... And the night was almost the same as that one. Only that one was at the end of August, when the whole city smells of apples, which lie in mountains in the markets, and it is so warm that it was a pleasure to walk in one blouse, belted with a Caucasian strap ... Is it possible to remember this night somewhere there, as if in sky?