For two days a warm wind

For two days a warm wind had been blowing from the south.
The last snow had melted off the fields. The foaming spring runnels had ceased their roaring, the gullies and rivulets of the steppe had finished gurgling. At dawn of the third day the wind died away and heavy mists descended over the steppe; the clumps of last year feather grass were silvered with moisture; the mounds, ravines and villages, the spires of the belfries, the arrowing crowns of the pyramidal poplars, were all drowned in an impenetrable milky haze.
That misty morning, for the first time after her recovery Aksinia went out on to the porch and stood long, intoxicated with the heady sweetness of the fresh spring air. Mastering her nausea and dizziness she walked as far as the well in the orchard, put down the bucket, and seated herself on the parapet.
Altogether different, marvellously fresh and enchanting seemed the world to Aksinia. With glittering eyes she agitatedly gazed about her, fingering the folds of her dress as would a child. The enmisted distance, the apple-trees in the orchard swimming with thaw-water, the wet palings and the road beyond them with its deep, water-filled ruts – all seemed incredibly beautiful to her; everything was blossoming with heavy yet delicate tints as though irradiated with sunlight.
A scrap of clean sky peering through the haze dazzled her with its chilly azure; the scent of rotting straw and thawed black earth was so familiar and pleasant that she sighed deeply and smiled at the corners of her lips; the artless snatch of song of a skylark reaching her ears from somewhere in the misty steppe awakened an unconscious sadness within her. And it was that snatch of skylark’s song heard in a strange land which sent Aksinia’s heart beating more quickly, and wrung two meagre little tears from her eyes.
Unthinkingly rejoicing in the life which had returned to her she experienced a tremendous desire to touch everything with her hands, to look at everything. She wanted to touch the currant bush which stood blackened with moisture, to press her cheek against the branch of an apple-tree covered with a velvety pale pink bloom, she desired to stride across the falling fencing and to walk trough the mire, away from all the tracks. To where beyond a broad hollow the fields of winter corn were showing wondrously green, merging with the misty distance.
For several days Aksinia lived in the expectation that at any moment Gregor would turn up. But at last she learned from neighbours who called on her host that the war was still going on, and that many Cossacks had sailed from Novorossisk to the Crimea, while those who had stayed behind had joined the Red Army or had been sent to the mines.
From the book ‘ The Don Flows Home to the Sea’ by Mikhail Sholokhov, translated by Stephen Garry