The African Boychild

  T HE  Professor received a telegram from the Lyalikovs' factory; he was asked to come as quickly as possible. The daughter of some Madame Lyalikov, apparently the owner of the factory, was ill, and that was all that one could make out of the long, incoherent telegram. And the Professor did not go himself, but sent instead his assistant, Korolyov. It was two stations from Moscow, and there was a drive of three miles from the station. A carriage with three horses had been sent to the station to meet Korolyov; the coachman wore a hat with a peacock's feather on it, and answered every question in a loud voice like a soldier: "No, sir!" "Certainly, sir!" It was Saturday evening; the sun was setting, the workpeople were coming in crowds from the factory to the station, and they bowed to the carriage in which Korolyov was driving. And he was charmed with the evening, the farmhouses and villas on the road, and the birch-trees, and the quiet atmosphere all around,

  THE LADY WITH THE DOG I I T  was said that a new person had appeared on the sea-front: a lady with a little dog. Dmitri Dmitritch Gurov, who had by then been a fortnight at Yalta, and so was fairly at home there, had begun to take an interest in new arrivals. Sitting in Verney's pavilion, he saw, walking on the sea-front, a fair-haired young lady of medium height, wearing a  béret ; a white Pomeranian dog was running behind her. And afterwards he met her in the public gardens and in the square several times a day. She was walking alone, always wearing the same  béret , and always with the same white dog; no one knew who she was, and every one called her simply "the lady with the dog." "If she is here alone without a husband or friends, it wouldn't be amiss to make her acquaintance," Gurov reflected. He was under forty, but he had a daughter already twelve years old, and two sons at school. He had been married young, when he was a student in his second year

  " This type of thing doesn’t just happen overnight,” the man in the white coat told him as he shined a blinding light into his cornea, but Mirko was quite certain that’s exactly what had happened. Marija squirmed in the corner of the ophthalmologist’s office. “Probably hereditary,” the doctor told him as he ushered Mirko and his daughter out the door, “but who can really say.” At first he had thought it was a speck of soil on the iceberg, a mere stain of earth defiling the cool head of green, but then it showed up again on the limbs of the butter leaf, and again, hidden in the wrinkles of the darkened kale bunches. The frisée, the cress, and the endives, Mirko soon realized, had it too. On the walk home, he stole glances at his daughter. His attention always came back to her nose, to the profile she had stolen from her mother, and to the small black patch that now obscured it. It was not a speck of soil, and two months, as the doctor had estimated, was not a lot of time. The pai