The Beauties

I. I remember when I was still in high school in the fifth or sixth level, I traveled with my grandfather from the village of Bolshaya Krepkaya in the Don region to Rostov-on Don.

- Anton Chekhov

It was a sultry, oppressive, boring August day. Out of the heat and dryness, a scorching wind drove a cloud of dust to meet us, gluing our eyes together, parching our mouths. You didn’t want to look around or speak or think, and when the drowsy driver, the Ukrainian Karpo, waving at the horse, lashed my peaked cap with his whip, I did not protest or let out a sound, but only roused up from a half-sleep and despondently and meekly looked in the distance to see if I could glimpse the village through the dust. We stopped to feed the horses in the big Armenian village of Bakhchi-Salakh, at a rich Armenian’s my grandfather knew.

Never in my life have I seen such a caricature of an Armenian. Picture a small, close-cut head with bushy, low-hanging brows, a hawk-nose with a long, gray moustache and a wide mouth, from which jutted out the long cherrywood mouthpiece of a Turkish pipe. This little head was awkwardly stuck atop a lean, humpbacked body, dressed in a fantastic costume: a short, red jacket and wide, bright-blue, loose trousers. This figure walked legs spread apart and shuffling in his slippers; and he spoke without taking the pipe out of his mouth, holding himself apart with pure Armenian dignity: not smiling, his eyes bulging, and trying to give his guests as little attention as possible.

In the Armenian’s rooms there was neither a breeze nor dust, but it was for all that as unpleasant, stuffy and dreary as on the steppes or along the road. I remember, dusty and worn out by the heat, I sat in the corner on a green chest. The unpainted wooden walls, furniture, and ochre-stained floors gave off the smells of dry, sunbaked wood. No matter where you looked, there were flies, flies, flies.