A young man watched them from the shade of the wide tree that stood behind the village at the junction of three footpaths across the barley and bean fields. The young man, Piotr Gavrilovitch Isaev, almost wished that Tatiana would never turn round. He knew her face so well and was so much afraid of it. Yet he whistled—do-mi-do—his old call to her, and she turned. He knew she would make no gesture of enthusiasm. She looked at him across fifty yards of shimmering evening sunlight for a long moment and then flapped her hand toward him with an abashed, rather rigid, gesture. He watched her talk for a minute to Katya as she dried her hands on her apron. Then Katya went into the house and Tatiana walked along the raised footpath toward the young man under the tree. He could see her exquisite pale face, her russet hair dragged tightly from her forehead under the kerchief, her rather sunken light eyes, now twitching with nervousness. Twice, as she approached, she smiled, as though rehearsing a smile—just a little abrupt delicate grin—a tautening and an instant slackening of her cheeks. It was a smile that seemed to mean nothing but a good intention, and was obliterated like a duty done. As soon as she reached him her expression changed like a changing light on her face, and she said, “Forgive me, dear Piotr Gavrilovitch. I have forgotten something; I must go back to the washing for a minute.” She turned away from him at once and began walking back along the footpath, as a ladybird hurrying along a leaf, on being turned round, walks just as industriously the other way.
Young Isaev, for a moment taken aback, caught up with her in three strides. “What’s the matter, Tatiana Pavlovna? I want to tell you something. Won’t you come and sit in the shade of the tree for half an hour?”
“Yes, of course I will, presently, dear Petya. I must do something I had forgotten, first.”
She always called people dear in a cold voice. Like her twitched-on, twitched-off smile, the dear was a sort of concession, kind yet shy, to humanity. She walked back to the washtubs and Piotr walked beside her.
“My aunt heard from my cousin Sasha Weber this morning,” said Piotr, after wondering for a moment what to say.
“Did he find the world as wide as he expected?” asked Tatiana.
“He hasn’t been all over it yet, Tanya, so he can’t tell. He has only reached Pa-tao-kou.”
“Oh,” said Tatiana, with her apologetic smile. She minded very much when her questions evoked dead answers. They often did. She tried to join in the talk in the manner of other talkers, but so often the talk mysteriously died of her gentle intervention. I think that a remark of hers, though dressed in the trappings of ordinary convenient comment, was often like a fairy coming into a room full of flesh-and-blood men and women. There was the fairy, in no tangible way different from themselves, dressed like themselves, walking, moving like themselves, yet somehow accompanied by cold airs, aloof, terrifying, humiliating. And one man finds that he has forgotten a letter he meant to write, another that he has a business appointment, another that he promised to take the dog for a walk … and so the poor fairy is left alone—not rudely but inexorably—left alone, looking itself up and down in the mirror, wondering what was wrong … wondering how they knew. …
Tatiana looked at Piotr with remorse, and saw uneasiness in his pink face. His face was ugly and anxious; his brassy hair and eyelashes looked lighter in tone than his face; his nose was sunburnt, prominent, and fat. Tatiana’s ready, cold pity was aroused by the tight puckered skin that enclosed his hurt feelings. She thought of the skull inside that skin—sensitive to a blow; of the brain inside that skull—protesting, defensive, bewildered, also afraid of assault. She saw him as a besieged creature in a fortress, marshaling its defenses against her. She felt as if she were trespassing against her will on something almost unbearably sacred, by simply seeing his face. She was seeing too much. Poor Piotr! this is not the way young girls should see young men—yet so it was! Tatiana, however, though only eighteen, was wise enough not to put her compassion into words.
She could not think of anything else to put into words, either. She always boggled over words, and would not have recognized the properly girlish ones, even if they had occurred to her. Nor was she interested enough in spanning this giddy space between herself and Piotr to risk anything for the sake of building a bridge over it. She did not know how to approach him; she could not bear that he should approach her. Her body she did not know, but in her mind she was fanatically virgin. Every approach was a danger, she could not have explained why. And yet she must be allowed to trespass secretly upon her neighbors; she must have hostages in many camps; she must send herself often far away from home to be a protesting prisoner in other bodies. A little pang in everyone’s pain seemed hers, just as a lamb’s leaping, an impudent flirt of a free bird’s wing, so often seemed part of her vicarious youth—a word she herself had known but left unspoken, a satisfaction in itself, like a flattery. Perhaps she was an egoist—an egoist whose center had slipped—an egoist whose ego had spilled over, tainted too much. She was like a person who lived on a mountain instead of in her own house. That was poor Piotr’s trouble, though he did not know it—Tatiana was never at home, waiting inside herself for visitors, as other young people are—waiting behind her own threshold—watching out of her own eyes. You might call—Tanya, Tanya—at her pretty ear, and her
