Three Years

MP3 Audio CD. Three Years

I

IT was dark, and already lights had begun to gleam here and there
in the houses, and a pale moon was rising behind the barracks at
the end of the street. Laptev was sitting on a bench by the gate
waiting for the end of the evening service at the Church of St.
Peter and St. Paul. He was reckoning that Yulia Sergeyevna would
pass by on her way from the service, and then he would speak to
her, and perhaps spend the whole evening with her.

He had been sitting there for an hour and a half already, and all
that time his imagination had been busy picturing his Moscow rooms,
his Moscow friends, his man Pyotr, and his writing-table. He gazed
half wonderingly at the dark, motionless trees, and it seemed strange
to him that he was living now, not in his summer villa at Sokolniki,
but in a provincial town in a house by which a great herd of cattle
was driven every morning and evening, accompanied by terrible clouds
of dust and the blowing of a horn. He thought of long conversations
in which he had taken part quite lately in Moscow--conversations
in which it had been maintained that one could live without love,
that passionate love was an obsession, that finally there is no
such love, but only a physical attraction between the sexes--and
so on, in the same style; he remembered them and thought mournfully
that if he were asked now what love was, he could not have found
an answer.

The service was over, the people began to appear. Laptev strained
his eyes gazing at the dark figures. The bishop had been driven by
in his carriage, the bells had stopped ringing, and the red and
green lights in the belfry were one after another extinguished--
there had been an illumination, as it was dedication day--but the
people were still coming out, lingering, talking, and sta