First Love

Part 1

I was sixteen at the time. It happened in the summer of 1883.

I was living in Moscow, with my parents. They used to take a house for the summer near the Kaluga Toll-gate. I was preparing for University, but worked little and slowly. 

Nobody interfered with my freedom. I did what I liked, particularly after the departure of my last tutor-a Frenchman who had never gotten used to the idea that he had been dropped 'like a bomb'(as he said) into Russia; he used to lie in bed helplessly for days on end, with an exasperated expression on his face. My father treated me with good-humored indifference; my mother scarcely noticed me, although she had no other children; she was absorbed by other things. My father, who was still young and very handsome, had not married her for love. He was ten years younger than my mother; she lived a gloomy life, and was in constant state of irritation and was always anxious and jealous- though never around my father. She was very frightened of him-his manner was very cold... I had never seen anyone more calm, or more self assured. 

I will never forget the first weeks I spent in the country. The weather was amazing- we left Moscow on May ninth, some saint day. I used to go for walks in our oversized garden, or in the park a few blocks away, or sometimes beyond the Toll-gate; I would take a book with me-though I never opened it, and would spend most of my time reading poetry aloud to myself- I knew a great many by heart. My heart was full of longing, sweetly and foolishly; I was all expectancy and wonder. I was waiting. I was sad and sometimes would cry- but through the tears and melancholy, I pushed through. 

I had many horses of my own, I used to saddle them myself and go riding to distant places. At times I would break into a gallop, imagining myself as a knight on my way to save a beautiful prince- or- well, princess at the time. 

I remember that at the time the image of a man, the shadowy vision of masculine love, scarcely every took shape in my mind. But in every thought, in every sensation, there lay hidden a half-conscious, shy awareness of something new, sweet, masculine... This sense of expectancy penetrated my whole self. I breathed in, it was in every drop of blood that flowed through my veins-soon it was to be fulfilled. 

The house we had taken was a large wooden building with pillars and two wide, low lodges. In the lodge on the left was a decently small factory for the manufacture of cheap wallpaper. Occasionally I used to wander over to it and watch a dozen or so village boys, lean, with pinched faces, in long greasy smocks, as they jumped on to wooden levers and forced them down on to the square blocks. And in this way, stamped the brightly colored patterns on the paper. The other lodge was empty. One day, after about three weeks after May ninth, the shutters on the lodge were opened and mens faces appeared in the windows - a family had moved in and payed my parents a hefty amount of consistent rent. I remember how at that day at dinner my mother asked the butler who our neighbors were, and hearing the name Prince Freecss, first said, not disrespectfully. "Ah, a prince..." but then she added, "a poor one, I expect?" "They came in three cabs, ma'am, and the furniture isn't worth mentioning." "Well," replied my mother, "it might have been worse." My father gave her a cold glare which silenced her.

And indeed Prince Freecss could not have been a rich man; the house he had taken was so decrypt and narrow and low that no one of even moderate means would have been willing to live there. Actually all this meant nothing to me at the time. The princely title and little effect on me. I had just been reading my all favorite poem.