PARTISAN REVIEW
315
"Bienne." It's still snowing. Nowadays the trains never stop for long;
the passengers can't go out to get hot water and they don't serve tea
in the dining car anymore, only complete meals. "I had no grounds
for jealousy," he says, to continue his story, "they were her broth–
ers.... I don't know how it came over me that night. It was in a
ski hut. She had made some mulled wine for her brothers because
it was cold, she spoke only to her brothers that night, and her broth–
ers spoke only to her, I wasn't part of the family. I found it funny,
that is to say, I tried to find it funny, it
was
funny, Fyodor Ivano–
vitch, but I'm a vain person. I just couldn't take Natasha's being
more attached to her brothers than to me. Am I possessive? I wasn't
drunk, after aU she had prepared the mulled wine for her brothers;
I didn't want any. You can imagine how cheerful it was. I didn't
say a word, for by now they were only speaking French. You under–
stand, that added to it. It's ridiculous. Suddenly I hated her, ob–
served her from aside and hated her, totally sober as I was. Or at
least so I thought; actually I loved her, but I hated the clan in her.
The clan! - I always find a clan awful, I could kill them.... It
came over me when we went to bed, all of us together, Natasha
and her brothers and
1.
To be exact : Natasha between her brothers
and myself. It was cold. I had been tending the wood-fire that whole
long evening, but she had made the hot wine for her brothers. They
were already snoring when a rage came over me, I felt it tear my
blanket away suddenly and seize me from outside, the rage, and
it made me sit up in the dark.. . . Did I mention that her brother,
the older one, was an officer? He was the stupider one, but Natasha
never reprimanded him. The younger one was a dancer, a choreog–
rapher or something of the sort, some kind of performer. He was
the one Natasha really admired - for the first time I understood
who I was: her lover.... It's possible that Natasha
ask~d
me in the
dark whether I was all right, whispering so that her brothers could
keep snoring; I didn't hear her. I've been to superior schools, but
I am and always will be a primitive person. Natasha would never
have thought it of me. And her brothers, not knowing anything more
than the fact that I loved Natasha, would never have thought it of
me either. ... It was winter, I've already said that, and it was night,
I didn't know where to go. Out into the deep snow. I wanted to freeze
to death, you understand, while they snored in the hut," he says
