He wasn't my Intended and he wasn't Asya's; he was shared between us. But actually, he wasn't anyone's because neither of us wanted him. We had an older sister1 too, but she was already married. But even if she hadn't been—she wouldn't have wanted him either. And who would have? Come to think of it, any girl would have—provided she had no intuition. He was young, and, if not handsome, then well-featured (and in general all kinds of things with "well-": well-mannered, well-intentioned, well-behaved, well-supplied with everything except... nobility, which he had none of, and just because he didn't...). He was, as they say, "an intelligent fellow," "educated," "polite," from a respectable family, with a good future... The future. That was the heart of the matter, for we were supposed to make his future, one of us, one of our father's two unmarried daughters. That was the reason he went wooing—no, not wooing, not even courting: stalking. And the way he went about it! In circles, the way a cat stalks the meat market. This cat, however, was well-fed, even a bit too well-fed. Long-limbed, heavy-set and, alas, full of something like sweat, something hard to detect, subcutaneous sweat, just the way water can be subterranean. But then, he was linked with water in toto. In the first place, his eyes: pure water with nothing in it except an initial impression of honesty. Honest blue water. Unendurably honest. You were gazed upon by two honest blank spots. When you are little they call those eyes "angelic," and later on "honest." Why are those eyes called "mermaid eyes" when they belong to women, but "honest eyes" when they belong to men? Those eyes are cited as a guarantee of honesty, but they usually belong to rascality itself. Using those eyes the rascals get honors in school, fathers-in-law, and directors' chairs. "A man with eyes like that could never..." Oh yes, a man with eyes like that really could, really could—do anything. It is characteristic of those eyes to look directly into yours, without a break, without a blink, to knock down your look like a ninepin, come what may, to outlook you. The second sensation: the lips are saying one thing and the eyes another: the eyes say their own piece and it's unfailingly bad. "I know something!"—"What is it?"—"Some piece of ugliness about you, ugliness that you yourself don't even know about." And so, in consternation, you start searching If a person is weak, he will certainly find something. One way or another you are beaten by those eyes in advance. For it is characteristic of those eyes to have power. The eyes of a judge. The exacting eyes of an interrogation. Of an interrogation and so, of an insinuation. I'll force you to confess!"—"To what?!"—"Why, to being just the same as I am." (As if yesterday's convict were investigating a former comrade.) The eyes of a presumed complicity from which you struggle vainly to disassociate yourself. And if you see through them you are even worse off than if you believe them. It's curious that it is those eyes, known among the intelligentsia as "honest," that the common people relentlessly call "shameless." A word, by the way, that you'll never hear spoken about black eyes; no, only about light ones, and among light eyes, only about blue eyes. And about blue eyes only when they have black eyelashes, the eyelashes which write down the truth as if in black and white, and the truth proclaims: "Watch out!" And, so as to cover the subject completely: honest as river water.

* * * * *

Our Intended was also linked with water by the place where we met: the River Oka. That was where the Intended's parents had a summer cottage in the town of Tarusa. The moment Asya and I entered it for the first time, we felt a heightened sense of suspicion: it's too... too what? Well, too cozy! The Intended's father, with a fat, dark-blue sateen stomach, barely held in by a twisted belt with tassels, who invited us in a honeyed voice to "have a spot of tea with a drop of honey" and even, as I remember, said, "do us the honor"; the suitor's mother, with those same eyes, only watered down and weakened, the "woman's share," the very same eyes but diluted: she had poured out every bit of blue for her son and left a drop for herself, the mother who drew us to the table with the insistent summons of a bad dream, and who prevailed on us to eat jam as if it weren't gooseberries in the little bowl, but living pearls. And the set-up itself—just that, a set-up, the way their things were set up to set upon and besiege you: the chairs tilted you over, the settees sucked you in, the tables (setting the trap) sat you down, and everything all together cast you into the profoundest paralysis of non-resistance. And I'm not even mentioning the "Russian style" of the salt cellars made in the shape of dippers, of the picture frames made in the shape of sloped-roofed houses, the ashtrays made in the shape of animal paws, all of it so foreign to our own household where everything was as simple as a blade of grass. And even the way they had of talking: a kind of coachmanly-chrismal speech made up of exclamations like "Whoa' there!" and "Hup!" interspersed with "The Lord saw fit" and "We're all under God's care" and—now I name the main thing—their servility. The servility that immediately put Asya and me onto the right track—of Tolya's "honest eyes."

"And why do they do it," we would say, rising and falling as if on waves along the hills that led from Tarusa to our own house, named Pesochnaia. "All well and good if we were princesses, or old ladies, or some sort of famous actresses... But they can't like us with our loose hair and elbows... Why, when you come right down to it, they ought to hate us."

"Chase us right out—just for the way we look."

"And did you notice how they kept on approving, how they would chuckle at every word..."

"Especially his father."

"Especially his mother."

"And Tolya sat there and melted into butter. Asya, I swear that he was smacking his lips. Yes, at you!"

"You're talking dirt. If he was smacking his lips, then it's got to be at you, because for me he's got to wait three more years at least, at the very least. But he only has one year to wait for you."

His third link with water was the bathhouse. You would arrive, an invited guest, in Tarusa, or in Moscow, and there would be his sister Nina right at the front door saying:

"Tolya's not here yet. (A whisper in your ear:) He's at the bathhouse. He asked me not to tell you, but we're friends so I'm telling you."

And when he would arrive from the bathhouse and say in a steamy voice, deliberately steamy: "You have the head of an Antinous2..." the mildest thing you could find to retort was: "Don't talk nonsense!"

"A man from a village bathhouse," Asya would say indignantly. "Although I've never seen men in a village bathhouse. He ought to be scratching merchants with a water-brush, not writing poems on Nereids. No wonder his father is always boasting that he came from simple provincials, but that now he's reached the ank of school supervisor. Of course, I'm all for equality," the :condary school sophomore went on, warming to the subject, "only not in choosing a husband. Better marry a Tsar you don't love than a sexton you do. And Anatoly isn 't someone I love."

And those lunches on birthdays! In our big white ballroom, sitting around the extended formal table, where the gray-haired German woman sat at the head, and where, among the other faces, all pleasant, young, ruddy, loomed the pale, russet-bearded and moustached face of Anatoly with a look that was drilling into one of us without letup.

"Marina! To your secret wish! Asya—to ours!"

"Wha-a-at did you say?!"

"Um Gottes Willen, Kind, screi dock nicht so furchtbar! "3

"A fine young man," the German woman would conclude after each of his visits. "Quiet, respectful, mit good manners. Only schade, that he has such a Kasegesicht. He should do more of gymnastik4 and eat more of prunes in compote."

But the servants, with all the visceral intuition of the common people, couldn't stand Anatoly.

"Not for anything, Asenka, don't marry him for anything! It's true he's round and white and even seems to have blue eyes, but all the same he's some kind of (in a whisper) garbage. Oh, he's very quiet. He's sure to beat you. Or even pinch you for fun. Or even stick pins into you. Because his soul belongs to a real serpent."

With the steady movement of a pendulum, the Intended vacillated from the younger to the elder for exactly a year. Just that way, from the younger to the elder, for, from the first minute it was clear that of two evils he preferred the lesser one, that is, Asya, lesser in age and with more hair and expectations, and divided from him only by the living and constantly changing wall of peasant boys and girls during the summer, and of city boys and girls during the winter. Whereas between him and me stood the immutable cliff-rock of St. Helena.5 Because as soon as he would say:

"Marina, you have eyes just like a dryad..."

I would make the simple association:

"But how horrible that there wasn't a single tree on St. Helena, that is, there were some trees, but not, as it happened, where Napoleon was. If you had lived then, would you have killed Hudson Lowe?"6

And how could a person go on talking about dryads then? I have not named the dryad at random, for the Intended was crammed with them: dryads, naiads. Rusalkas and vestals. And when he had tried out on me, one by one, all the heroines of antiquity and of Merezhkovsky7 and had come to despair of ever hearing anything in answer exeept curses on Maria Louisa8 and praises of the Countess Valevskaya, who had come to him on Elba, the Intended finally slackened off: fell away. But the four-page-long dedications in verse kept coming; the honest, high-pressure looks that forced me (since that's just why they came!) to lower my eyes kept coming, but now it was all just a "maybe," a reserve, "stocking up" in the event that Asya, really and truly, would not... And Asya—how I love a thirteen-year-old girl!—really would not, not for anything.

"And when, Asya, will you grow out of those haystacks and bonfires along with those Gregs and Mikes whose company lowers you? And when, Asya, will you grow up once and for all?"

"For you—never."

"... finally let the scales fall from your eyes."

"For you—never."

"How young you still are! How too, too young!"

"For you—always!"

In Moscow, Tolya's prospects fared even worse, for in Tarusa the very ground was fat with rumor. Rumors came by water: the River Oka itself told the Intended with whom his thirteen-year-old Prospect had been riding yesterday in a leaky boat, with whom she had been shouting: "Transvaal, Transvaal, my land" on the sands until three in the morning and until she was utterly hoarse. Whereas in Moscow snowstorms swept and rainstorms washed all the traces away. However, Asya herself was the first to publicize everything.

"I've met a writer, Tolya, a realistic writer, and he has such eyes! Black, like Pushkin's."

"Pushkin's eyes were blue."9 (I am quoting verbatim.)

"You're telling tales, Tolya, it's you who have blue eyes. He's called Pasha and I call him The Pasha..."

And so on and so on.

It must be stated that Asya was very pretty, with a pleasant, special, individual grace, and if she didn't lay all hearts waste it was out of her special, human and womanly goodness, boundless goodness even then, that reached its limit only at Anatoly.

"If only you really were like Anatoly in 'War and Peace'"10 she would say meditatively, looking at him first from the right side, then from the left.

"But since you're like Levin, and not even Levin, but..."

"They've given you serious books too early..." the Intended would interrupt, so as not to hear, whom he was like.

"And a book like you—isn't that too early? Books like that it's better not to read, ever."

* * * * *

"Papa, do you like Anatoly?"

"Our new yardman?"

"No, Papa! Our yardman is named Anton, and this is a student, Tikhonravov."

"Ahhh. Isn't he, at least it seems that way, rather distant? (And just when we thought that the question was already exhausted:) And there's some kind of strange smell that comes from him..."

And that was the testimony that answered the "petits soins"11 with which he surrounded father, the constant Latin and Greek quotations in casual conversation, all his labor in his future status as son-in-law, a status which, because of father's simple-heartedness, and because of my age and Asya's, and mainly, because of father's whole make-up, could not even have entered his mind.

The years passed, not many, but full years. Our name-sake nut trees rose higher by so much, last year's notches for our heights rose higher on the doorpost. We passed into the final classes we had to attend in school. And all of a sudden, a letter comes to us in Pesochnaia, via a messenger from Tarusa. A letter to Asya. Tolya's hand. We open it: there among the small beads of the handwriting is a fat, squashed caterpillar.

"Idiot," Asya said coldly.

"A self-portrait," I elaborated.

Under the caterpillar was a sentence: "Take care of yourself for my sake and for yours."

"Impudent boor! He writes as if I were already in a special condition!"

And then and there, with one flourish, she writes on the reverse side: "I am returning you your property and informing you herewith that nothing of yours or received from you remains in my possession"

"Be careful, Asya! He'll make you remember that caterpillar."

The caterpillar (accindental, of course) proved to be fatal. I''or it underscored as if with a very fat line the total impossibility for Anatoly of that union. It was the last dash and the last stroke. That same winter, Asya met Boris T.12 at the ice rink and soon afterwards married him.

* * * * *

A large hyphen. The year 1921, in spring. Asya had just come back from Theodosia where she had been stuck beginning in 1917.13 During the final year they were boiling moss. She was gaunt, ragged, but unchangeably alive and vivacious.

"Marina, I'm going to go to work in the museum."

"You've lost your mind. Anatoly is there now, as the director. "

"Anatoly—as the director?! And even without getting married to us? Well, he's a lucky man!"

"Not only without getting married to us, but married to the most ordinary young lady, just right for him."

"Just right... a young lady? I'm off to the museum this minute!"

The return and the story:

"I come in. He's sitting at Papa's desk; he doesn't stand up. 'You've been back long?'—'Since yesterday.'—'What is it you want?'—'A job in the museum.'—'There are no jobs available.' Then I said to him very succinctly, but very clearly: 'Maybe there would be one for me? At least think it over, Tolya.'—'I'll think it over, but, even if something turns up, don't...'—'I don't expect anything special.' And right then, Marina, in comes the wife without a knock, as if it were her own room. A young thing, pretty— a far cry from us, even back then!—really pretty: a little doll with well-turned nails and elbows, and in a white dress with flounces. She fluttered in, twittered something and fluttered out. He didn't even introduce us. Not to mention his not proposing that I sit down, and there I was, standing the whole time, all wrapped up in what was going on."

A week later a typed notice with the director's signature arriving stating that Asya had been hired as a non-staff employee, a librarian's aide, at a salary of... but I'm afraid of making a mistake. I only know that the salary was pitiful. And so Asya worked as a non-staff employee in the museum which father had established for ten years, outlasting by nine and a half years the director Anatoly, who, for reasons unknown, but very soon, was requested to vacate the director's chair. But all the same, he had managed to sit down in it.

At present, Anatoly has become a writer. His books come out printed on fine paper, with a red edging, in linen bindings. The subjects of his books come from abroad, the writing of his books comes from an editorial board.14 And that is how, even without marrying me, he became a writer. But the question is-a writer of what?
-September 1933

1. Valeria Ivanovna Tsvetaeva (1883-1966) was Tsvetaeva's half-sister by their father's first marriage. She figures prominently in "The Devil" where her education and career are briefly sketched. Tsvetaeva's account of Valeria in her letters to Bunina is less extreme than the cumulative portrait found in the published prose; in the latter Tsvetaeva concentrated on those aspects of her half-sister which accorded with her particular mythic vision of their zhenskii rod or "female line." One of the letters to Bunina gives an outline of Valeria's personality and a view of her married life which does not enter into the prose autobiography. "And do you know about Valeria?" Tsvetaeva writes. "After a long and very troubled life (we are all difficult)—emotionally troubled!-she finally married at the age of 30 (maybe now she is in fact no longer married) a huge cub-bear, something like a bogatyr', unbelievably shaggy: a thicket! with the surname Shev-liagin, apparently of peasant origins. She was already with him in 192- and is with him at the present. She had many children; all of them died when they were young. I don't know whether one, at least, survived. She and I had a strange relationship: she could not bear my resemblance to my mother (mainly a resemblance of voice and of intonations). But we all, in the long run, are wolves. She was an unusually difficult human being, first and foremost for herself. Perhaps now I might come to an understanding with her. She loved me very much in childhood. We never write to each other. Maybe I will write now, and then I will pass on your greeting." (Letter to V. N. Bunina, August 19, 1933,M P., pp. 417-18.)

2. Born between A.D. 110-12, Antinous was beloved of the Emperor Hadrian. When in 130 he was drowned in the Nile, he was revered as a deity, at Hadrian's insistence. Hadrian commemorated him in Egypt by founding a new city, Antinoopolis. Antinous figures prominently in Margaret Yourcenar's Hadrian's Memoirs, published in its revised version in 1963.

3. German. "For the Lord's sake, child, don't shout so horribly!"

4. Put entirely into English the Germano-Russian original means: "Quiet, respectful, and he has good manners. Only it's a pity that his face looks so cheesy. He should get more vigorous exercise and eat more stewed prunes."

5. St. Helena, of course, is the island of Napoleon's final exile. Here the island stands for the young Tsvetaeva's somewhat obsessive interest in the French Emperor, which in this case serves to ward off Anatoly's unwelcome attentions.

6. Hudson Lowe was installed by the British as governor of St. Helena during Napoleon's final years there; he replaced someone who had been much more sympathetic to the exiled Emperor.

7. Dmitry Sergeevich Merezhkovsky (1865-1941) is most significant as a critic and essayist. He was one of the first to articulate the watershed reached by Russian poetry in the early nineties, and he is the author of important studies on the great nineteenth-century prose writers: Tolstoi and Dostoevsky, 1 vols., 1901 and 1902; and Gogol and the Devil (1906). Tsvetaeva refers here to Merezhkovsky's trilogy of three historical novels Christ and Antichrist (Khristos i antikhrist), in which Christianity and the paganism of classical antiquity are juxtaposed at three different periods.

8. Maria Louisa of Austria was Napoleon's second wife and the mother of Napoleon II, the "King of Rome." Except for her stupidity and cowardice, her son might well have continued the Napoleonic rule in France.

9. Pushkin's eyes actually were blue. Tsvetaeva's sarcasm must be understood in the context of her emphasis on Pushkin's Ethiopian ancestry and the symbolic importance of the color black—the color of Negro eyes, the color of the towering Pushkin monument, and, more generally, the color of the negritude in which all poets share.

10. Anatoly Kuragin, a dangerously attractive but dishonorable officer, who nearly carries off Natasha Rostova.

11. French. "Little attentions."

12. Anastasia Tsvetaeva's first husband, Boris Sergeevich Trukhachev (1893-1920).

13. The two sisters were cut off from one another by the Civil War. Asya stayed in the Crimea while Marina was alone in Moscow with her children.

14. Anatoly (Anatoly Kornelievich Vinogradov, 1888-1946) is the author of a book on the French writer Prosper Merimee, and of a series of fictionalized biographical works: TheThree Colors of Time (Tri tsveta vremeni), 1931, The Lost Glove: Stendhal in Moscow (Poteriannaia perchatka), 1931, A Tale of the Brothers Turgenev (Povesf o brat'iakh Turgenevykh), 1932, etc. Vinogradov was Director of the Lenin Library from 1921-25.