FIVE SHORT STORIES FOR NATALIE

The Fifth Story—the Last One

THE LOVER

He too, the chairman of the council, the most respectable man in the village, was seduced by the charms of the young widow. After dark, when his exhausted wife and little children had fallen asleep (the two elder sons slept on straw in the barn), he quietly left by the front door and made his way across the gardens to The Hump, where the widow lived. He didn’t want anybody to see him, so he crept along like a criminal, crouching in the bushes for a long time whenever he heard the slightest sound. It was a peculiar sensation for him to hear his heart pounding in his chest, perhaps from a fear of being found out, because he had never been afraid of anything in his life. His heart had pounded like that when he first saw the drop-dead gorgeous young widow—it would have been a sin not to call on her, so he dared to do it. Not immediately, it’s true. At first, he spent a long time searching for a pretext. His preference would have been for the young widow to get into some kind of trouble—nothing serious, mind—so the responsibil­ity of sorting it out would fall to him. He would have gone to see her as a representative of the authorities, and the widow would have been well-disposed towards him; indeed she might even have taken a liking to him, which would have made life easier in a situation he found it difficult to handle. The thing is, he simply didn’t know how to get into conversation with a strange woman and steer her, without being too blatant about it, in the direction he wanted. But the widow gave him no pretext and today he was going to see her with no particular idea in mind; he was just driven by sheer lust. Perhaps there was one thing that worried him: the chairman of the council usually goes to see people on official business in broad daylight, not at night when it’s dark. And when he gets to the young widow’s, what if one of her lovers is there? How should he react? Shout at her: “Why are you living in sin? Why are you breaking God’s commandments?” And what if the young widow’s lover asks him: “Well, what are you doing here at this time of night?” He had a response ready for such an eventuality: “I am the chairman of the council, and the chairman of the council is supposed to see order is kept at night-time as well as during the day.” But if he came across an argumentative lover who asked him: “Then why have you come on your own without witnesses as the chairman of the council ought to have done at this late hour?” he would reply, “Your wife asked me to catch you at it, you old layabout. Without making a big fuss though, because that would be embarrassing for her in front of people and in front of the children.” At first, he was satisfied with his presence of mind, but when he considered how he should behave towards the young widow after that, he became uneasy, his resolve weakened and his legs began to give way.

Perhaps he should give her a fright, saying he would tell the priest, who would condemn her dissolute behavior from the pulpit and make her do penance. This would alarm the widow, and on her knees she would start to beg him, the chairman of the council, not to do it, and he would lift her up from the floor and begin to reassure her, stroking her curly tresses, her lovely face and her ample shoulders. At the pros­pect of feeling her firm breasts too, his face flushed and he shook his head, saying to himself: “Christ, Yura, how childish is that, you daft old goat. Just go home to your wife and pray; these are the tempta­tions of the devil.” But he did not have the strength to return; he was utterly feeble in the face of the force that was driving him towards the widow. He crept towards the darkened windows of the widow’s house, imagining that inside, in the deserted house, on the bed—on those white sheets—a young woman was lying alone, unable to sleep without a man’s caresses, and his desire to get into the house grew stronger. He began to scratch at the window with a finger-nail, whispering softly:

“Eufrusina, open the window for a moment.”

But nobody came to the window, so he went to the door and began knocking gently, continuing to whisper Eufrusina’s name. He recalled that when it was freezing cold, his dog whined piteously, begging to be let indoors, just like this. This made him, the chairman of the council, the most respectable man in the village, uncomfortable in his indecision. So he went back to the window and knocked on it loudly. A light immediately flashed in the house, shining straight at him, the chairman of the council, causing him to recoil into the darkness of the night. He heard the young widow asking in an annoyed voice:

“Who’s there?”

He quite forgot his momentary dissatisfaction with himself, trot­ting up to the window and whispering with delight:

“It’s me, Eufrusina, the chairman of the council. Open the door.”

“But what if someone is in the house and has heard everything, and spreads rumors all round the village?”—the thought suddenly crossed his mind and it was as though somebody had poured a bucket of cold water over him. But he immediately recovered and coolly, as though in somebody else’s voice, shouted out:

“Open the door, Eufrusina. It’s me, the chairman of the council. I’ve come to see you about a certain matter.”

The young widow opened the door, carrying a gas lamp. She wore a linen blouse, revealing her full breasts; her full head of hair was let down, flowing as it was caught in the light and the chairman of the council found it arousing. The young widow looked relaxed and there was not the slightest sign of fear in her eyes. On the contrary, they radiated a happy playfulness and she had a smile on her lips.

He went indoors. When he saw her lover sitting at the table, his jaw dropped in surprise and everything he had been ready to say to the illicit lover flew right out of his head, because it was his eldest son Mitro who was sitting at the table, no old layabout yet but just a lad with his moth­er’s milk scarcely dry on his lips, looking at him quite unconcerned. It was actually the fact that his son was looking at him so calmly that took his breath away. He showed his son the door and he left unhurriedly, while the chairman of the council, shifting from one leg to the other, stayed on outside the house for a while and then followed his son.

On the way home, he considered that he ought to give his son a good hiding, because then it would mean that he had come for him in person, the chairman of the council and the father, and now the widow would realize why he had visited her so late at night. But perhaps it was better that she should know that.

In the morning, he told his son:

“Mitro, if you walk over to see that widow, I’ll break both your legs. Got it?”

“Yes, Dad,” his son replied. Suddenly—and this was a consider­able surprise to the chairman of the council—the son’s eyes sparkled with amusement and the lad found it hard to avoid laughing out loud.

“Watch it! Don’t you dare to laugh about it,” said the chairman of the council severely.

The son kept his promise never to walk over to see the widow, but every night he was at her house.

When darkness fell, the young widow would come to the village from The Hump and carried Mitro home on her shoulders. Hiding in the orchard, the chairman of the council was surprised to see the widow carrying the boy. She followed the winding path, passed the well, went round the grove of hornbeam trees up to the old wild apple tree. Here she stopped for a moment to turn Mitro round and settle him better on her shoulders, then she climbed up to the cottage on The Hump. The chairman of the council watched all this spellbound. O Lord, how he wished he could carry the young widow off to her cottage like that, on his shoulders, but she had eyes only for his own lad. Sometimes he, as chairman of the council, considered going to the widow’s and giving his son a good hiding, but at the thought of how cleverly he had fooled him and still managed to keep his word, an involuntarily smile would come to his lips. After all, this wasn’t just anybody, it was his own flesh and blood, his son, who had gotten away with it so resourcefully. He heard the neighbors calling to one another in surprise:

“Look, look, Eufrusina has carried off the chairman of the coun­cil’s Mitro on her shoulders again.”

The chairman of the council found this amusing too, but he could not forget the young widow; he still dreamt of her at night and he gave a deep groan when his wife, alarmed by his moaning, woke him and asked if he was in pain.

“No,” he replied feebly, “go to sleep, love, go to sleep . . .”

Translated by Patrick Corness and Natalia Pomirko