Read The Adolescence of Zhenya Luvers for Free Online Page A

very bright, sullen and still, as if the sun, with spectacles on its nose, were rummaging in a crowfoot.
    What then made Zhenya open her mouth in wonder? A discovery that interested her far more than the people who helped her make it.
    Was there a small shop... ? Behind the garden gate ... In such a street ... “The happy ones” ... She envied the unknown women. They were three.
    They were black, like the word “nun” in the song. Three symmetrical necks bowed under round hats. The outermost one, half-concealed by a bush, was leaning on something and seemed to be asleep. The other two, nestling tightly against her, were also asleep. The hats were blue-black, they shimmered in the sun and then went out, like fireflies. They were entwined with black crepe. At this moment, the unknown women turned their heads and looked in another direction. Something at the far end of the street had obviously attracted their attention. They stared that way for a minute, as one stares in the summer when the light dissolves a second and draws it out, when one blinks and has to protect one’s eyes with a hand—they stared for a moment, and then sank back into their former state of sleepy immobility.
    Zhenya wanted to go into the house, but she missed her book and could not remember immediately where she had left it. Then she went to fetch it and when she reached the woodpile she saw that the unknown women had moved and were about to leave. They walked in Indian file to the garden gate. A small man with the peculiar gait of the lame followed them. He carried under his arm a gigantic album or atlas. So that was what had occupied their attention when they were looking over each other’s shoulders and she had thought they were asleep! The strangers walked through the garden and disappeared behind the farm buildings. The sun set. Zhenya reached for her book and slipped on the logs. The woodpile woke up and moved as if it were alive. A few logs slid down and fell onto the grass with a quiet bump. This was the sign, like the nightwatchman’s tap with the door knocker. The evening was born. From the other side of the river the air whistled an old tune.
    The yard was empty. Prokhov had finished his work and gone outside the gate. Out there the melancholy strumming of a soldier’s balalaika now glided closely, very closely, over the grass. Above it danced a thin swarm of mosquitoes. The strumming of the balalaika grew still thinner and fainter. It sank deeper toward the earth than the insects, but it never quite fell into the dust; lighter and airier than the mosquito swarm, it rose, twinkling and dissolving in peaceful harmonies.
    Zhenya returned to the house. “Lame,” she thought of the unknown man with the album, “lame but a gentleman without crutches.” She went in by the back door. The yard smelled sweetly and obtrusively of camellias. “Mama has a regular drugstore, a mass of little blue bottles with yellow caps.”
    She walked slowly up the stairs. The iron railing was cold. The steps creaked in response to her dragging pace. Suddenly a strange thought entered her mind. She took two steps at a time and stopped on the third. She discovered that there had existed for some time an inexplicable likeness between her mother and the porter’s wife. It was quite inexplicable. She stood still. It is, she thought, like when one says, “We are all people” or “We are all baptized with water” or “Fate makes no difference... .” She pushed away a fallen bottle with the tip of her foot, and it fell below on the dusty mat without breaking. She thought, “It is something quite universal, something that all men have in common.” But why, then, was there no likeness between herself and Aksinya? Or between Aksinya and Ulyasha? This seemed all the stranger to Zhenya because two more different persons could hardly be imagined. Aksinya had an earthy quality, like a vegetable