CHAPTER THREE

The Sventitskys’ Christmas Party

1

One winter Alexander Alexandrovich gave Anna Ivanovna an antique wardrobe, which he had picked up somewhere or other. It was made of ebony and was so enormous that it would not go through any door in one piece. It was taken into the house in sections; the problem then was where to put it. It would not do for the reception rooms because of its function nor for the bedrooms because of its size. In the end, a part of the landing was cleared for it outside the master bedroom.

Markel, the porter, came to put it together. He brought with him his six-year-old daughter Marinka. She was given a stick of barley sugar. Sniffling, and sucking the candy and her moist fingers, she stood intently watching her father.

At first everything went smoothly. The wardrobe grew in front of Anna Ivanovna’s eyes; when only the top remained to be put on, she took it into her head to help Markel. She climbed onto the raised floor of the wardrobe, slipped, and fell against the sides, which were held in place only by tenons. The rope that Markel had tied loosely around them came undone. Anna Ivanovna fell on her back together with the boards as they clattered to the ground, and bruised herself painfully.

Markel rushed to her. “Oh, Madam, mistress,” he said. “What made you do that, my dear? You haven’t broken any bones? Feel your bones. It’s the bones that matter, the soft part doesn’t matter at all, the soft parts mend in God’s good time, and, as the saying goes, they’re only for pleasure anyway.—Don’t bawl, you stupid!” he reprimanded the crying Marinka. “Wipe your nose and go to your mother.—Ah, Madam, couldn’t you trust me to set up that clothes chest without you? Of course, to you I’m only a porter, you can’t think otherwise, but the fact is, I was a cabinetmaker, yes, Ma’am, cabinetmaking was my trade. You wouldn’t believe how many cupboards and sideboards of all kinds, lacquer and walnut and mahogany, passed through my hands. Or, for that matter, how many well-to-do young ladies passed me by, and vanished from under my nose, if you’ll forgive the expression. And it all comes from drink, strong liquor.”

Markel pushed over an armchair, and with his help Anna Ivanovna sank into it groaning and rubbing her bruises. Then he set about restoring the wardrobe. When he put the top on he said, “Now the doors, and it’ll be fit for an exhibition.”

Anna Ivanovna did not like the wardrobe. Its appearance and size reminded her of a catafalque or a royal tomb and filled her with a superstitious dread. She nicknamed it the tomb of Askold;[7] she meant the horse of Prince Oleg,[8] which had caused its master’s death. She had read a great deal, but haphazardly, and she tended to confuse related ideas.

After that accident Anna Ivanovna developed a pulmonary weakness.

2

Throughout November, 1911, Anna Ivanovna stayed in bed with pneumonia.

Yura, Misha Gordon, and Tonia were due to graduate the following spring, Yura in medicine, Tonia in law, and Misha, who studied at the Faculty of Philosophy, in philology.

Everything in Yura’s mind was still helter-skelter, but his views, his habits, and his inclinations were all distinctly his own. He was unusually impressionable, and the originality of his vision was remarkable.

Though he was greatly drawn to art and history, he scarcely hesitated over the choice of a career. He thought that art was no more a vocation than innate cheerfulness or melancholy was a profession. He was interested in physics and natural science, and believed that a man should do something socially useful in his practical life. He settled on medicine.

In the first year of his four-year course he had spent a term in the dissecting room, situated in the cellars of the university. You went down the winding staircase. There was always a crowd of dishevelled students, some poring over their tattered textbooks surrounded by bones, or quietly dissecting, each in his corner, others fooling about, cracking jokes and chasing the rats that scurried in swarms over the stone floors. In the half darkness of the mortuary the naked bodies of unidentified young suicides and drowned women, well preserved and untouched by decay, shone like phosphorus. Injections of alum solutions rejuvenated them, giving them a deceptive roundness. The corpses were cut open, dismembered, and prepared, yet even in its smallest sections the human body kept its beauty, so that Yura’s wonder before some water nymph brutally flung onto a zinc table continued before her amputated arm or hand. The cellar smelled of carbolic acid and formaldehyde, and the presence of mystery was tangible in everything, from the obscure fate of these spread-out bodies to the riddle of life and death itself—and death was dominant in the underground room as if it were its home or its headquarters.

The voice of this mystery, silencing everything else, haunted Yura, disturbing him in his anatomical work. He had become used to such distracting thoughts and took them in his stride.

Yura had a good mind and was an excellent writer. Ever since his schooldays he had dreamed of composing a book about life which would contain, like buried explosives, the most striking things he had so far seen and thought about. But he was too young to write such a book; instead, he wrote poetry. He was like a painter who was always making sketches for a big canvas he had in mind.

He was indulgent toward these immature works on account of their vigor and originality. These two qualities, vigor and originality, in his opinion gave reality to art, which he otherwise regarded as pointless, idle, unnecessary.

Yura realized the great part his uncle had played in molding his character.

Nikolai Nikolaievich now lived in Lausanne. In his books, published there in Russian and in translations, he developed his old view of history as another universe, made by man with the help of time and memory in answer to the challenge of death. These works were inspired by a new interpretation of Christianity, and led directly to a new conception of art.

Misha Gordon was influenced by these ideas even more than Yura. They determined him to register at the Faculty of Philosophy. He attended lectures on theology, and even considered transferring later to the theological academy.

Yura advanced and became freer under the influence of his uncle’s theories, but Misha was fettered by them. Yura realized that his friend’s enthusiasms were partly accounted for by his origin. Being tactful and discreet, he made no attempt to talk him out of his extravagant ideas. But he often wished that Misha were a realist, more down-to-earth.

3

One night at the end of November Yura came home late from the university; he was exhausted and had eaten nothing all day. He was told that there had been a terrible alarm that afternoon. Anna Ivanovna had had convulsions. Several doctors had seen her; at one time they had advised Alexander Alexandrovich to send for the priest, but later they had changed their minds. Now she was feeling better; she was fully conscious and had asked for Yura to be sent to her the moment he got back.

Yura went up at once.

The room showed traces of the recent commotion. A nurse, moving noiselessly, was rearranging something on the night table. Towels that had been used for compresses were lying about, damp and crumpled. The water in the slop basin was pinkish with expectorated blood, and broken ampoules and swollen tufts of cotton wool floated on its surface.

Anna Ivanovna lay drenched in sweat, with parched lips. Her face had become haggard since morning.

“Can the diagnosis be wrong?” Yura wondered. “She has all the symptoms of lobar pneumonia. It looks like the crisis.” After greeting her and saying the encouraging, meaningless things that are always said on such occasions, he sent the nurse out of the room, took Anna Ivanovna’s wrist to feel her pulse, and reached into his coat pocket for his stethoscope. She moved her head to indicate that this was unnecessary. He realized that she wanted him for some other reason. She spoke with effort.

“They wanted to give me the last sacraments. ... Death is hanging over me. ... It may come any moment. ... When you go to have a tooth out you’re frightened, it’ll hurt, you prepare yourself. ... But this isn’t a tooth, it’s everything, the whole of you, your whole life ... being pulled out. ... And what is it? Nobody knows. ... And I am sick at heart and terrified.”

She fell silent. Tears were streaming down her cheeks. Yura said nothing. A moment later Anna Ivanovna went on.

“You’re clever, talented. ... That makes you different. ... You surely know something. ... Comfort me.”

“Well, what is there for me to say?” replied Yura. He fidgeted on his chair, got up, paced the room, and sat down again. “In the first place, you’ll feel better tomorrow! There are clear indications—I’d stake my life on it—that you’ve passed the crisis. And then—death, the survival of consciousness, faith in resurrection ... You want to know my opinion as a scientist? Perhaps some other time? No? Right now? Well, as you wish. But it’s difficult like that, all of a sudden.” And there and then he delivered a whole impromptu lecture, astonished that he could do it.

“Resurrection. In the crude form in which it is preached to console the weak, it is alien to me. I have always understood Christ’s words about the living and the dead in a different sense. Where could you find room for all these hordes of people accumulated over thousands of years? The universe isn’t big enough for them; God, the good, and meaningful purpose would be crowded out. They’d be crushed by these throngs greedy merely for the animal life.

“But all the time, life, one, immense, identical throughout its innumerable combinations and transformations, fills the universe and is continually reborn. You are anxious about whether you will rise from the dead or not, but you rose from the dead when you were born and you didn’t notice it.

“Will you feel pain? Do the tissues feel their disintegration? In other words, what will happen to your consciousness? But what is consciousness? Let’s see. A conscious attempt to fall asleep is sure to produce insomnia, to try to be conscious of one’s own digestion is a sure way to upset the stomach. Consciousness is a poison when we apply it to ourselves. Consciousness is a light directed outward, it lights up the way ahead of us so that we don’t stumble. It’s like the headlights on a locomotive—turn them inward and you’d have a crash.

“So what will happen to your consciousness? Your consciousness, yours, not anyone else’s. Well, what are you? There’s the point. Let’s try to find out. What is it about you that you have always known as yourself? What are you conscious of in yourself? Your kidneys? Your liver? Your blood vessels? No. However far back you go in your memory, it is always in some external, active manifestation of yourself that you come across your identity—in the work of your hands, in your family, in other people. And now listen carefully. You in others—this is your soul. This is what you are. This is what your consciousness has breathed and lived on and enjoyed throughout your life—your soul, your immortality, your life in others. And what now? You have always been in others and you will remain in others. And what does it matter to you if later on that is called your memory? This will be you—the you that enters the future and becomes a part of it.

“And now one last point. There is nothing to fear. There is no such thing as death. Death has nothing to do with us. But you said something about being talented—that it makes one different. Now, that does have something to do with us. And talent in the highest and broadest sense means talent for life.

“There will be no death, says St. John. His reasoning is quite simple. There will be no death because the past is over; that’s almost like saying there will be no death because it is already done with, it’s old and we are bored with it. What we need is something new, and that new thing is life eternal.”

He was pacing up and down the room as he was talking. Now he walked up to Anna Ivanovna’s bed and putting his hand on her forehead said, “Go to sleep.” After a few moments she began to fall asleep.

Yura quietly left the room and told Egorovna to send in the nurse. “What’s come over me?” he thought. “I’m becoming a regular quack—muttering incantations, laying on the hands. ...”

Next day Anna Ivanovna was better.

4

Anna Ivanovna continued to improve. In the middle of December she tried to get up but she was still weak. The doctors told her to stay in bed and have a really good rest.

She often sent for Yura and Tonia and for hours on end talked to them of her childhood, spent on her grandfather’s estate, Varykino, on the river Rynva, in the Urals. Neither Yura nor Tonia had ever been there, but listening to her, Yura could easily imagine those ten thousand acres of impenetrable virgin forest as black as night, and, thrusting into it like a curved knife, the bends of the swift stream with its rocky bed and steep cliffs on the Krueger side.

For the first time in their lives Yura and Tonia were getting evening clothes, Yura a dinner jacket and Tonia a pale satin party dress with a suitably modest neckline.

They were going to wear them at the traditional Christmas party at the Sventitskys’ on the twenty-seventh. When the tailor and the seamstress delivered the clothes, Yura and Tonia tried them on, were delighted, and had not yet taken them off when Egorovna came in asking them to go to Anna Ivanovna.

They went to her room in their new clothes. On seeing them, she raised herself on her elbow, looked them over, and told them to turn around.

“Very nice,” she said. “Charming. I had no idea they were ready. Let me have another look, Tonia. No, it’s all right, I thought the yoke puckered a bit. Do you know why I’ve called you? But first I want a word with you, Yura.”

“I know, Anna Ivanovna, I know you’ve seen the letter, I had it sent to you myself. I know you agree with Nikolai Nikolaievich. You both think I should not have refused the legacy. But wait a moment. It’s bad for you to talk. Just let me explain—though you know most of it already.

“Well, then, in the first place, it suits the lawyers that there should be a Zhivago case because there is enough money in Father’s estate to cover the costs and to pay the lawyers’ fees. Apart from that there is no legacy—nothing but debts and muddle—and a lot of dirty linen to be washed. If there really had been anything that could be turned into money, do you think I’d have made a present of it to the court and not used it myself? But that’s just the point—the whole case is trumped up. So rather than rake up all that dirt it was better to give up my right to a nonexistent property and let it go to all that bunch of false rivals and pretenders who were after it. One claimant, as you know, is a certain Madame Alice, who calls herself Zhivago and lives with her children in Paris—I’ve known about her for a long time. But now there are various new claims—I don’t know about you, but I was told of them quite recently.

“It appears that while Mother was still alive, Father became infatuated with a certain dreamy, eccentric Princess Stolbunova-Enrici. This lady has a son by him, Evgraf; he is ten years old.

“The Princess is a recluse. She lives—God knows on what—in her house just outside Omsk, and she never goes out. I’ve seen a photograph of the house. It’s very handsome, with five French windows and stucco medallions on the cornices. And recently I’ve been having the feeling that the house was staring at me nastily, out of all its five windows, right across all the thousands of miles between Siberia and Moscow, and that sooner or later it would give me the evil eye. So what do I want with all this—imaginary capital, phony claimants, malice, envy? And lawyers.”

“All the same, you shouldn’t have renounced it,” said Anna Ivanovna. “Do you know why I called you?” she asked again and immediately went on, “His name came back to me. You remember the forest guard I was telling you about yesterday? He was called Bacchus. Extraordinary, isn’t it! A real bogeyman, black as the devil, with a beard growing up to his eyebrows, and calls himself Bacchus! His face was all disfigured, a bear had mauled him but he had fought it off. And they’re all like that out there. Such names—striking, sonorous! Bacchus or Lupus or Faustus. Every now and then somebody like that would be announced—perhaps Auctus or Frolus—somebody with a name like a shot from your grandfather’s gun—and we would all immediately troop downstairs from the nursery to the kitchen. And there—you can’t think what it was like—you’d find a charcoal dealer with a live bear cub, or a prospector from the far end of the province with a specimen of the ore. And your grandfather would always give them a credit slip for the office. Some were given money, some buckwheat, others cartridges. The forest came right up to the windows. And the snow, the snow! Higher than the roofs!” Anna Ivanovna had a coughing fit.

“That’s enough, it’s bad for you,” Tonia and Yura urged her.

“Nonsense, I’m perfectly all right. That reminds me. Egorovna told me that you two are worrying about whether you should go to the party the day after tomorrow. Don’t let me hear anything so silly again, you ought to be ashamed of yourselves! And you call yourself a doctor, Yura! So that’s settled, you’ll go, and that’s that. But to return to Bacchus. He used to be a blacksmith when he was young. He got into a fight and was disembowelled. So he made himself a set of iron guts. Now, Yura, don’t be silly. Of course I know he couldn’t. You mustn’t take it literally! But that’s what the people out there said.”

She was interrupted by another coughing fit, a much longer one than the last. It went on and on; she could not get her breath.

Yura and Tonia hurried across to her simultaneously. They stood shoulder to shoulder by her bedside. Their hands touched. Still coughing, Anna Ivanovna caught their hands in hers and kept them joined awhile. When she was able to speak she said: “If I die, stay together. You’re meant for each other. Get married. There now, you’re engaged,” she added and burst into tears.

5

As early as the spring of 1906—only a few months before she would begin her last year in the gymnasium—six months of Lara’s liaison with Komarovsky had driven her beyond the limits of her endurance. He cleverly turned her wretchedness to his advantage, and when it suited him subtly reminded her of her shame. These reminders brought her to just that state of confusion that a lecher requires in a woman. As a result, Lara felt herself sinking ever deeper into a nightmare of sensuality which filled her with horror whenever she awoke from it. Her nocturnal madness was as unaccountable as black magic. Here everything was topsy-turvy and flew in the face of logic; sharp pain manifested itself by peals of silvery laughter, resistance and refusal meant consent, and grateful kisses covered the hand of the tormentor.

It seemed that there would be no end to it, but that spring, as she sat through a history lesson at the end of term, thinking of the summer when even school and homework would no longer keep her from Komarovsky, she came to a sudden decision that altered the course of her life.

It was a hot morning and a storm was brewing. Through the open classroom windows came the distant droning of the town, as monotonous as a beehive, and the shrieks of children playing in the yard. The grassy smell of earth and young leaves made her head ache, like a Shrovetide surfeit of pancakes and vodka.

The lesson was about Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign. When the teacher came to the landing at Fréjus, the sky blackened and was split by lightning and thunder, and clouds of dust and sand swept into the room together with the smell of rain. Two teacher’s pets rushed out obligingly to call the handyman to shut the windows, and as they opened the door, the wind sent all the blotting paper flying off the desks.

The windows were shut. A dirty city rain mingled with dust began to pour. Lara tore a page out of an exercise book, and wrote a note to her neighbor, Nadia Kologrivova:

“Nadia, I’ve got to live away from Mother. Help me to find a tutoring job, as well paid as possible. You know lots of rich people.”

Nadia wrote back:

“We are looking for a governess for Lipa. Why not come to us—it would be wonderful! You know how fond my parents are of you.”

6

Lara spent three years at the Kologrivovs’ as behind stone walls. No one bothered her, and even her mother and brother, from whom she had become estranged, kept out of her way.

Lavrentii Mikhailovich Kologrivov was a big businessman, a brilliant and intelligent practitioner of the most modern methods. He hated the decaying order with a double hatred, as a man rich enough to outbid the treasury, and as a member of the lower classes who had risen to fabulous heights. In his house he sheltered revolutionaries sought by the police, and he paid the defense costs in political trials. It was a standing joke that he was so keen on subsidizing the revolution that he expropriated himself and organized strikes at his own plants. An excellent marksman and a passionate hunter, he went to the Serebriany woods and Losin Island in the winter of 1905, giving rifle training to workers’ militia.

He was a remarkable man. His wife, Serafima Filippovna, was a worthy match. Lara admired and respected both of them, and the whole household loved her and treated her as a member of the family.

For more than three years Lara led a life free from worries. Then one day her brother Rodia went to see her. Swaying affectedly on his long legs and drawling self-importantly, he told her that the cadets of his class had collected money for a farewell gift to the head of the Academy and entrusted it to him, asking him to choose and buy the gift. This money he had gambled away two days ago down to the last kopek. Having told his story, he flopped full length in an armchair and burst into tears.

Lara sat frozen while Rodia went on through his sobs:

“Last night I went to see Victor Ippolitovich. He refused to talk about it with me, but he said if you wished him to ... He said that although you no longer loved any of us, your power over him was still so great ... Lara darling ... One word from you would be enough. ... You realize what this means to me, what a disgrace it is ... the honor of my uniform is at stake. Go to see him, that’s not too much to ask, speak to him ... You can’t want me to pay for this with my life.”

“Your life ... The honor of your uniform.” Lara echoed him indignantly, pacing the room. “I am not a uniform. I have no honor. You can do what you like with me. Have you any idea of what you are asking? Do you realize what he is proposing to you? Year after year I slave away, and now you come along and don’t care if everything goes smash. To hell with you. Go ahead, shoot yourself. What do I care? How much do you need?”

“Six hundred and ninety odd rubles. Say seven hundred in round figures,” he added after a slight pause.

“Rodia! No, you’re out of your mind! Do you know what you are saying? You’ve gambled away seven hundred rubles! Rodia! Rodia! Do you realize how long it takes an ordinary person like me to earn that much by honest work?”

She broke off and after a short silence said coldly, as if to a stranger, “All right. I’ll try. Come tomorrow. And bring your revolver—the one you were going to shoot yourself with. You’ll hand it over to me, for good. And with plenty of bullets, remember.”

She got the money from Kologrivov.

7

Her work at the Kologrivovs’ did not prevent Lara from graduating from the gymnasium, and taking university courses. She did well, and was to obtain her diploma the following year, 1912.

In the spring of 1911 her pupil Lipa graduated from the gymnasium. She was already engaged to a young engineer, Friesendank, who came of a good, well-to-do family. Lipa’s parents approved of her choice but were against her marrying so young, and urged her to wait. This led to scenes. Lipa, the spoiled and willful darling of the family, shouted at her parents and stamped her feet.

In this rich household where Lara was accepted as a member of the family, no one reminded her of her debt or indeed remembered it. She would have paid it back long before, if she had not had secret expenses.

Unknown to Pasha, she sent money to his father, who had been deported to Siberia, helped his querulous and ailing mother, and reduced his own expenses by paying part of his board and lodging directly to his landlady. It was she who had found him his room in a new building in Kamerger Street near the Art Theater.

Pasha, who was a little younger than Lara, loved her madly and obeyed her slightest wish. After graduating from the Realgymnasium, he had, at her urging, taken up Greek and Latin. It was her dream that after they had passed their state examinations the following year they would marry and go out as gymnasium teachers to some provincial capital in the Urals.

In the summer of 1911 Lara went for the last time with the Kologrivovs to Duplyanka. She adored the place, and was even fonder of it than its owners. They knew this, and every summer on their arrival the same scene was enacted as though by an unwritten agreement. When the hot, grimy train left them at the station, Lara, overwhelmed by the infinite silence and heady fragrance of the countryside, and speechless with emotion, was allowed to walk alone from the railroad station to the estate. Meanwhile, the luggage was loaded onto a cart, and the family climbed into their barouche and listened to the Duplyanka coachman in his scarlet shirt and sleeveless coat telling them the latest local news.

Lara walked along the tracks following a path worn by pilgrims and then turned into the fields. Here she stopped and, closing her eyes, took a deep breath of the flower-scented air of the broad expanse around her. It was dearer to her than her kin, better than a lover, wiser than a book. For a moment she rediscovered the purpose of her life. She was here on earth to grasp the meaning of its wild enchantment and to call each thing by its right name, or, if this were not within her power, to give birth out of love for life to successors who would do it in her place.

That summer she had arrived exhausted by the many duties she had undertaken. She was easily upset. Generous and understanding by nature, she developed a new suspiciousness and a tendency to nurse petty grievances.

The Kologrivovs were as fond of her as ever and wanted her to stay on with them, but now that Lipa had grown up she felt that she had become useless to them. She refused her salary. They had to press it on her. At the same time she needed the money, and it would have been embarrassing and unfeasible to earn it independently while she was their guest.

Lara felt that her position was false and unendurable. She imagined that they all found her a burden and were only putting a good face on it. She was a burden to herself. She longed to run away from herself and from the Kologrivovs—anywhere—but according to her standards, she must first repay the money she had borrowed, and at the moment she had no means of doing it. She felt that she was a hostage—all through Rodia’s stupid fault—and was trapped in impotent exasperation.

She suspected slights at every turn. If the Kologrivovs’ friends were attentive to her she was sure that they regarded her as a submissive “ward” and an easy prey. If they left her alone, that proved that she did not exist for them.

Her fits of moodiness did not prevent her from sharing in the amusements of the many house guests. She swam, went boating, joined in night picnics by the river, and danced and let off fireworks with the rest. She took part in amateur theatricals and with even more zest in shooting competitions. Short Mauser rifles were used in these contests, but she preferred Rodia’s light revolver and became very skillful in its use. “Pity I’m a woman,” she said, laughing, “I’d have made an expert duellist.” But the more she did to distract herself, the more wretched she felt and the less she knew what she wanted.

When they went back to town it was worse than ever, for to her other troubles were now added her tiffs with Pasha (she was careful not to quarrel with him seriously; she regarded him as her last refuge). Pasha was beginning to show a certain self-assurance. His tone was becoming a little didactic, and this both amused and irritated her.

Pasha, Lipa, the Kologrivovs, money—everything whirled inside her head. She was disgusted with life. She was beginning to lose her mind. She was obsessed with the idea of breaking with everything she had ever known or experienced, and starting on something new. In this state, at Christmastime in the year 1911, she arrived at a fatal decision. She would leave the Kologrivovs now, at once, and become independent, and she would get the money for this from Komarovsky. It seemed to her that after all there had been between them and the years of independence she had won for herself, he must help her chivalrously, disinterestedly, without explanations or disgraceful conditions.

With this in mind she set out for Petrovka Street on the night of the twenty-seventh. Rodia’s revolver, loaded and with the safety catch off, was inside her muff. Should Komarovsky refuse or humiliate her in any way, she intended to shoot him.

She walked through the festive streets in a terrible excitement, seeing nothing. The intended revolver shot had already gone off in her heart—and it was a matter of complete indifference whom the shot was aimed at. This shot was the only thing that she was conscious of. She heard it all the way to Petrovka Street, and it was aimed at Komarovsky, at herself, at her own fate, and at the wooden target on the Duplyanka oak tree.

8

“Don’t touch my muff!”

Emma Ernestovna had put out her hand to help her off with her coat; she had received her with Oh’s and Ah’s, telling her that Victor Ippolitovich was out but she must stay and wait for him.

“I can’t. I’m in a hurry. Where is he?”

He was at a Christmas party. Clutching the scrap of paper with the address on it, Lara ran down the familiar gloomy staircase with its stained-glass coats of arms and started off for the Sventitskys’ house in Flour Town.

Only now, when she came out for the second time, did she take a look around her. It was winter. It was the city. It was night.

It was bitter cold. The streets were covered with a thick, black, glassy layer of ice, like the bottom of beer bottles. It hurt her to breathe. The air was dense with gray sleet and it tickled and pricked her face like the gray frozen bristles of her fur cape. Her heart thumping, she walked through the deserted streets past the steaming doors of cheap teashops and restaurants. Faces as red as sausages and horses’ and dogs’ heads with beards of icicles emerged from the mist. A thick crust of ice and snow covered the windows, and the colored reflections of lighted Christmas trees and the shadows of merrymakers moved across their chalk-white opaque surfaces as on magic lantern screens; it was as though shows were being given for the benefit of pedestrians.

In Kamerger Street Lara stopped. “I can’t go on. I can’t bear it.” The words almost slipped out. “I’ll go up and tell him everything.” Pulling herself together, she went in through the heavy door.

9

Pasha, his face red from the effort, his tongue pushing out his cheek, stood in front of the mirror struggling with a collar, a stud, and the starched buttonhole of his shirt front. He was going to a party. So chaste and inexperienced was he that Lara embarrassed him by coming in without knocking and finding him with this minor incompleteness in his dress. He at once noticed her agitation. She could hardly keep on her feet. She advanced pushing the hem of her skirt aside at each step as if she were fording a river.

He hurried toward her. “What’s the matter?” he said in alarm. “What has happened?”

“Sit down beside me. Sit down, don’t bother to finish dressing. I’m in a hurry, I must go in a minute. Don’t touch my muff. Wait, turn the other way for a minute.”

He complied. Lara was wearing a tailored suit. She took off her coat, hung it up, and transferred Rodia’s revolver from the muff to a pocket. Then she went back to the sofa.

“Now you can look,” she said. “Light a candle, and turn off the electricity.”

She liked to sit in the dim light of candles, and Pasha always kept a few spare ones. He replaced the stump in the candlestick with a new candle, put it on the window sill, and lit it. The flame choked and spluttered, shooting off small stars, and sharpened to an arrow. A soft light filled the room. In the sheet of ice covering the windowpane a black eyelet began to form at the level of the flame.

“Listen, Pasha,” said Lara. “I am in trouble. You must help me. Don’t be frightened and don’t question me. But don’t ever think we can be like other people. Don’t take it so lightly. I am in constant danger. If you love me, if you don’t want me to be destroyed, we must not put off our marriage.”

“But that’s what I’ve always wanted,” broke in Pasha. “Just name the day. I’m ready when you are. Now tell me plainly what is worrying you. Don’t torment me with riddles.”

But Lara evaded his question, imperceptibly changing the subject. They talked a long time about a number of things that had nothing to do with her distress.

10

That winter Yura was preparing a scientific paper on the nervous elements of the retina for the University Gold Medal competition. Though he had qualified only in general medicine, he had a specialist’s knowledge of the eye. His interest in the physiology of sight was in keeping with other sides of his character—his creative gifts and his preoccupation with imagery in art and the logical structure of ideas.

Tonia and Yura were driving in a hired sleigh to the Sventitskys’ Christmas party. After six years of late childhood and early adolescence spent in the same house they knew everything there was to know about each other. They had habits in common, their own special way of snorting at each other’s jokes. Now they drove in silence, their lips tightly closed against the cold, occasionally exchanging a word or two, and absorbed in their own thoughts.

Yura was thinking about the date of his competition and that he must work harder at his paper. Then his mind, distracted by the festive, end-of-the-year bustle in the streets, jumped to other thoughts. He had promised Gordon an article on Blok for the mimeographed student paper that he edited; young people in both capitals were mad about Blok, Yura and Gordon particularly. But not even these thoughts held his mind for long. He and Tonia rode on, their chins tucked into their collars, rubbing their frozen ears, and each of them thinking of something else. But on one point their thoughts converged.

The recent scene at Anna Ivanovna’s bedside had transformed them. It was as though their eyes had opened, and they appeared to each other in a new light.

Tonia, his old friend, who had always been taken for granted and had never needed explaining, had turned out to be the most inaccessible and complicated being he could imagine. She had become a woman. By a stretch of imagination he could visualize himself as an emperor, a hero, a prophet, a conqueror, but not as a woman.

Now that Tonia had taken this supreme and most difficult task on her slender and fragile shoulders (she seemed slender and fragile to him, though she was a perfectly healthy girl), he was filled with the ardent sympathy and timid wonder that are the beginning of passion.

Tonia’s attitude to Yura underwent a similar change.

It occurred to Yura that perhaps they should not, after all, have gone out. He was worried about Anna Ivanovna. They had been on the point of leaving when, hearing that she was feeling less well, they had gone to her room, but she had ordered them off to the party as sharply as before. They had gone to the window to have a look at the weather. As they came out, the net curtains had clung to Tonia’s new dress, trailing after her like a wedding veil. They all noticed this and burst out laughing.

Yura looked around him and saw what Lara had seen shortly before. The moving sleigh was making an unusually loud noise, which was answered by an unusually long echo coming from the ice-bound trees in the gardens and streets. The windows, frosted and lighted from inside, reminded him of precious caskets made of smoky topaz. Behind them glowed the Christmas life of Moscow, candles burned on trees, and guests in fancy dress milled about playing hide-and-seek and hunt-the-ring.

It suddenly occurred to Yura that Blok reflected the Christmas spirit in all domains of Russian life—in this northern city and in the newest Russian literature, under the starry sky of this modern street and around the lighted tree in a twentieth-century drawing room. There was no need to write an article on Blok, he thought, all you had to do was to paint a Russian version of a Dutch Adoration of the Magi with snow in it, and wolves, and a dark fir forest.

As they drove through Kamerger Street Yura noticed that a candle had melted a patch in the icy crust on one of the windows. The light seemed to look into the street almost consciously, as if it were watching the passing carriages and waiting for someone.

“A candle burned on the table, a candle burned ...,” he whispered to himself—the beginning of something confused, formless; he hoped that it would take shape of itself. But nothing more came to him.

11

From time immemorial the Sventitskys’ Christmas parties followed the same pattern. At ten, after the children had gone home, the tree was lit a second time for the others, and the party went on till morning. The more staid people played cards all night long in the “Pompeiian” sitting room, curtained off from the ballroom by a heavy portiere on bronze rings. Before daybreak they would all have supper together.

“Why are you so late?” asked the Sventitskys’ nephew, Georges, running through the entrance hall on his way to his uncle’s and aunt’s rooms. Yura and Tonia took off their things and looked in at the ballroom door before going to greet their hosts.

Rustling their dresses and treading on each other’s toes, those who were not dancing but walking and talking moved like a black wall past the hotly breathing Christmas tree with its several tiers of lights.

In the center of the room the dancers twirled and spun dizzily. They were paired off or formed into chains by a young law school student, Koka Kornakov, son of an assistant public prosecutor who was leading the cotillion. “Grand rond!” he bellowed at the top of his voice across the room, or “Chaîne chinoise!”—and they all followed his orders. “Une valse, s’il vous plaît,” he shouted to the pianist as he led his partner at the head of the first round, whirling away with her and gradually slowing down in ever smaller and smaller circles until they were barely marking time in what was still the dying echo of a waltz. Everyone clapped, and ices and cool drinks were carried around the noisy, milling, shuffling crowd. Flushed boys and girls never stopped shouting and laughing as they greedily drank cold cranberry juice and lemonade, and the moment they put down their glasses on the trays the noise was ten times louder, as if they had gulped down some exhilarating mixture.

Without stopping in the ballroom, Tonia and Yura went through to their hosts’ rooms in the back.

12

The living rooms of the Sventitskys were cluttered up with furniture that had been moved out of the ballroom and the drawing room. Here was the Sventitskys’ magic kitchen, their Christmas workshop. The place smelled of paint and glue, and there were piles of colored wrappings and boxes of cotillion favors and spare candles.

The Sventitskys were writing names on cards for presents and for seats at the supper table and numbers on tickets for a lottery. They were helped by Georges, but he kept losing count and they grumbled at him irritably. They were overjoyed at Tonia’s and Yura’s coming; they had known them as children and unceremoniously set them to work.

“Feliciata Semionovna cannot understand that this should have been done in advance, not right in the middle of the party when the guests are here. Look what you’ve done now, Georges—the empty bonbonnières go on the sofa and the ones with sugared almonds on the table—now you’ve mixed up everything.”

“I am so glad Annette is better. Pierre and I were so worried.”

“Except that she’s worse, not better, darling—worse, do you understand? You always get things devant-derrière.”

Yura and Tonia spent half the evening backstage with Georges and the old couple.

13

All this time Lara was in the ballroom. She was not in evening dress and did not know anyone there, but she stayed on, either waltzing with Koka Kornakov like a sleepwalker or wandering aimlessly around the room.

Once or twice she stopped and stood hesitating outside the sitting room, in the hope that Komarovsky, who sat facing the doorway, might see her. But he did not take his eyes from his cards, which he held in his left hand and which shielded his face, and he either really did not notice her or pretended not to. She was choking with mortification. A girl whom she did not know went in from the ballroom. Komarovsky looked at her in the way Lara remembered so well. The girl was flattered and flushed and smiled with pleasure. Lara crimsoned with shame and nearly screamed. “A new victim,” she thought. Lara saw, as in a mirror, herself and the whole story of her liaison. She did not give up her plan to speak to him but decided to do it later, at a more convenient moment; forcing herself to be calm, she went back to the ballroom.

Komarovsky was playing with three other men. The one on his left was Kornakov, the father of the elegant young man with whom Lara was dancing again, so she understood from the few words she exchanged with him. And the young man’s mother was the tall dark woman in black with fiercely burning eyes and an unpleasantly snakelike neck who went back and forth between the ballroom and the sitting room, watching her son dancing and her husband playing cards. And finally Lara learned that the girl who had aroused such complicated feelings in her was the young man’s sister and that her suspicions had been groundless.

She had not paid attention to Koka’s surname when he had first introduced himself, but he repeated it as he swept her in the last gliding movement of the waltz to a chair and bowed himself off. “Kornakov. Kornakov.” It reminded her of something. Of something unpleasant. Then it came back to her. Kornakov was the assistant public prosecutor at the Moscow central court who had made a fanatical speech at the trial of the group of railway men which had included Tiverzin. At Lara’s wish, Kologrivov had gone to plead with him, but without success. “So that’s it. ... Well, well, well. ... Interesting. ... Kornakov. Kornakov.”

14

It was almost two in the morning. Yura’s ears were ringing. There had been an interval with tea and petits fours and now the dancing had begun again. No one bothered any more to replace the candles on the tree as they burned down.

Yura stood uneasily in the middle of the ballroom, watching Tonia dancing with a stranger. She swept up to him, flounced her short satin train—like a fish waving its fin—and vanished in the crowd.

She was very excited. During the interval, she had refused tea and had slaked her thirst with innumerable tangerines, peeling them and wiping her fingers and the corners of her mouth on a handkerchief the size of a fruit blossom. Laughing and talking incessantly, she kept taking the handkerchief out and unthinkingly putting it back inside her sash or her sleeve.

Now, as she brushed past the frowning Yura, spinning with her unknown partner, she caught and pressed his hand and smiled eloquently. The handkerchief she had been holding stayed in his hand. He pressed it to his lips and closed his eyes. The handkerchief smelled equally enchantingly of tangerines and of Tonia’s hand. This was something new in Yura’s life, something he had never felt before, something sharp that pierced him from top to toe. This naïvely childish smell was as intimate and understandable as a word whispered in the dark. He pressed the handkerchief to his eyes and lips, breathing through it. Suddenly a shot rang out inside.

Everyone turned and looked at the portiere that hung between the ballroom and the sitting room. There was a moment’s silence. Then the uproar began. Some people rushed about screaming, others ran after Koka into the sitting room from which the sound of the shot had come; others came out to meet them, weeping, arguing and all talking at once.

“What has she done, what has she done!” Komarovsky kept saying in despair.

“Boria, Boria, tell me you’re alive,” Mrs. Kornakov was screaming hysterically. “Where is Doctor Drokov? They said he’s here. Oh, but where, where is he?—How can you, how can you say it’s nothing but a scratch! Oh, my poor martyr, that’s what you get for exposing all those criminals! There she is, the scum, there she is, I’ll scratch your eyes out, you slut, you won’t get away this time! What did you say, Komarovsky? You? She shot at you? No, I can’t bear it, this is a tragic moment, Komarovsky, I haven’t time to listen to jokes. Koka, Kokochka! Can you believe it? She tried to kill your father. ... Yes. ... But Providence ... Koka! Koka!”

The crowd poured out of the sitting room into the ballroom. At the head of it came Kornakov, laughingly assuring everyone that he was quite all Bright and dabbing with a napkin at a scratch on his left hand. Another group, somewhat apart, was leading Lara by the arms.

Yura was dumfounded. This girl again! And again in such extraordinary circumstances! And again that gray-haired man. But this time Yura knew who he was—the prominent lawyer, Komarovsky, who had had something to do with his father’s estate. No need to greet him. They both pretended not to know each other. And the girl ... So it was the girl who had fired the shot? At the prosecutor? Must be for political reasons. Poor thing. She was in for a bad time. How haughtily beautiful she was! And those louts, twisting her arms, as if she were a common thief!

But at once he realized that he was mistaken Lara’s legs gave way under her, they were holding her up and almost carrying her to the nearest armchair, where she collapsed.

Yura was about to rush up to her to bring her around but thought it proper first to show some interest in the victim He walked up to Kornakov.

“I am a doctor,” he said. “Let me see your hand. Well, you’ve been lucky. It’s not even worth bandaging. A drop of iodine wouldn’t do any harm, though. There’s Feliciata Semionovna, we’ll ask her.”

Mrs. Sventitskaia and Tonia, who were coming toward him, were white-faced. They told him to leave everything and quickly get his coat. There had been a message from home, they were to go back at once.

Yura, imagining the worst, forgot everything else and ran for his things.

15

They did not find Anna Ivanovna alive. When they ran up the stairs to her room she had been dead for ten minutes. The cause of death had been an attack of suffocation resulting from acute edema of the lungs; this had not been diagnosed in time. For the first few hours Tonia screamed, sobbed convulsively, and recognized no one. On the following day she calmed down but could only nod in answer to anything that Yura and her father said to her; each time she tried to speak, her grief overpowered her and she began to scream again as if she were possessed.

In the intervals between the services she knelt for hours beside the dead woman, her large, fine hands clasping a corner of the coffin standing on its dais, covered with wreaths. She was oblivious of the people around her. But whenever her eyes met those of her friends she would quickly get up and hurry from the room and up the stairs, repressing her sobs until she fell on the bed and buried her bursts of despair in the pillow.

Sorrow, standing for many hours on end, lack of sleep, the deep-toned singing and the dazzling candles by night and day as well as the cold he had caught, filled Yura’s soul with a sweet confusion, a fever of grief and ecstasy.

When his mother had died ten years earlier he had been a child. He could still remember how he had cried, grief-stricken and terrified. In those days he had not been primarily concerned with himself. He could hardly even realize that such a being as Yura existed on its own or had any value or interest. What mattered then was everything outside and around him. From every side the external world pressed in on him, dense, indisputable, tangible as a forest. And the reason he had been so shaken by his mother’s death was that, at her side, he had lost himself in the forest, suddenly to find her gone and himself alone in it. The forest was made up of everything in the world—clouds and shop signs and the golden balls on fire towers and the bare-headed riders who went as escort before the holy image of the Mother of God carried in a coach. Shop fronts were in it, and arcades, and the inaccessibly high star-studded sky, and the Lord God and the saints.

This inaccessibly high sky once came all the way down to his nursery, as far as his nurse’s skirt when she was talking to him about God; it was close and within reach like the tops of hazel trees in the gullies when you pulled down their branches and picked the nuts. It was as if it dipped into the gilt nursery washbasin and, having bathed in fire and gold, re-emerged as the morning service or mass at the tiny church where he went with his nurse. There the heavenly stars became the lights before the icons, and the Lord God was a kindly Father, and everything more or less fell into its right place. But the main thing was the real world of the grownups and the city that loomed up all around him like a forest. At that time, with the whole of his half-animal faith, Yura believed in God, who was the keeper of that forest.

Now it was quite different. In his twelve years at gymnasium and university, Yura had studied the classics and Scripture, legends and poets, history and natural science, which had become to him the chronicles of his house, his family tree. Now he was afraid of nothing, neither of life nor of death; everything in the world, all the things in it were words in his vocabulary. He felt he was on an equal footing with the universe. And he was affected by the services for Anna Ivanovna differently than he had been by the services for his mother. Then he had prayed in confusion, fear, and pain. Now he listened to the services as if they were a message addressed to him and concerning him directly. He listened intently to the words, expecting them, like any other words, to have a clear meaning. There was no religiosity in his reverence for the supreme powers of heaven and earth, which he worshipped as his progenitors.

16

“Holy God, holy and mighty, holy and deathless, have mercy on us.” What was it? Where was he? They must be taking out the coffin. He must wake up. He had fallen asleep in his clothes on the sofa at six in the morning. Now they were hunting for him all over the house, but no one thought of looking in the far corner of the library behind the bookshelves.

“Yura! Yura!” Markel was calling him. They were taking out the coffin. Markel would have to carry the wreaths, and nowhere could he find Yura to help him; to make matters worse he had got stuck in the bedroom where the wreaths were piled up, because the door of the wardrobe on the landing had swung open and blocked that of the bedroom.

“Markel! Markel! Yura!” people were shouting from downstairs. Markel kicked open the door and ran downstairs carrying several wreaths.

“Holy God, holy and mighty, holy and deathless,” the words drifted softly down the street and stayed there; as if a feather duster had softly brushed the air, everything was swaying—wreaths, passers-by, plumed horses’ heads, the censer swinging on its chain from the priest’s hand, and the white earth under foot.

“Yura! My God! At last.” Shura Shlesinger was shaking his shoulder. “What’s the matter with you? They’re carrying out the coffin. Are you coming with us?”

“Yes, of course.”

17

The funeral service was over. The beggars, shuffling their feet in the cold, closed up in two ranks. The hearse, the gig with wreaths on it, and the Kruegers’ carriage stirred and swayed slightly. The cabs drew up closer to the church. Out of it came Shura Shlesinger, crying; lifting her veil, damp with tears, she cast a searching glance at the crowd, spotted the pallbearers, beckoned to them, and went back into the church. More and more people were pouring out.

“Well, so now it’s Anna Ivanovna’s turn. She sends her best regards. She took a ticket to a far place, poor soul.”

“Yes, her dance is over, poor cricket, she’s gone to her rest.”

“Have you got a cab or are you going to walk?”

“I need to stretch my legs after all that standing. Let’s walk a bit and then we’ll take a cab.”

“Did you see how upset Fufkov was? Looking at her, tears pouring down his face, blowing his nose, staring at her face. Standing next to her husband at that.”

“He always had his eye on her.”

They slowly made their way to the cemetery at the other end of town. That day the hard frost had broken. It was a still, heavy day; the cold had gone and the life had gone too—it was a day as though made for a funeral. The dirty snow looked as if it shone through crêpe, and the firs behind the churchyard railings, wet and dark like tarnished silver, seemed to be in deep mourning.

It was in this same churchyard that Yura’s mother lay buried. He had not been to her grave in recent years. He glanced in its direction and whispered, “Mother,” almost as he might have done years before.

They dispersed solemnly, in picturesque groups, along the cleared paths, whose meanderings did not harmonize with the sorrowful deliberation of their step. Alexander Alexandrovich led Tonia by the arm. They were followed by the Kruegers. Black was very becoming to Tonia.

Hoarfrost, bearded like mold, sprouted on the chains with crosses hanging from the domes and on the pink monastery walls. In the far corner of the monastery yard, washing hung on lines stretching from wall to wall—shirts with heavy sodden sleeves, peach-colored tablecloths, badly wrung out and crookedly fastened sheets. Yura realized that this, altered in appearance by the new buildings, was the part of the monastery grounds where the blizzard had raged that night.

He walked on alone, ahead of the others, stopping occasionally to let them catch up with him. In answer to the desolation brought by death to the people slowly pacing after him, he was drawn, as irresistibly as water funnelling downward, to dream, to think, to work out new forms, to create beauty. More vividly than ever before he realized that art has two constant, two unending concerns: it always meditates on death and thus always creates life. All great, genuine art resembles and continues the Revelation of St. John.

With joyful anticipation he thought of the day or two which he would set aside and spend alone, away from the university and from his home, to write a poem in memory of Anna Ivanovna. He would include all those random things that life had sent his way, a few descriptions of Anna Ivanovna’s best characteristics, Tonia in mourning, street incidents on the way back from the funeral, and the washing hanging in the place where, many years ago, the blizzard had raged in the night and he had wept as a child.