CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Opposite the House of Sculptures

1

Merchant Street rambled crookedly downhill, overlooked by the houses and churches of the upper part of Yuriatin.

At the corner there was the dark gray house with sculptures. The huge square stones of the lower part of its facade were covered with freshly posted sheets of government newspapers and proclamations. Small groups of people stood on the sidewalk, reading in silence.

After the recent thaw it was dry and frosty. Now it was light at a time of day when only a few weeks before it had been dark. The winter had just gone, and the emptiness it had left was filled by the light that lingered on into the evenings. The light made one restless, it was like a call from afar that was disturbing, it put one on one’s guard.

The Whites had recently left the town, surrendering it to the Reds. The bombardment, bloodshed, and wartime anxieties had ceased. This too was disturbing, and put one on one’s guard, like the going of the winter and the lengthening of the spring days.

One of the proclamations pasted on the wall and still readable by the light of the longer day announced:

“Workbooks are obtainable by those qualified at the cost of 50 rubles each, at the Food Office, Yuriatin Soviet, 5 October Street (formerly Governor Street), Room 137.

“Anyone without a workbook, or filling it in incorrectly, or (still worse) fraudulently, will be prosecuted with the utmost rigor of the wartime regulations. Detailed instructions for the correct use of workbooks are printed in I.Y.I.K. No. 86 (1013) for the current year and are posted at the Yuriatin Food Office, Room 137.”

Another proclamation stated that the town had ample food supplies. These, it said, were merely being hoarded by the bourgeoisie with the object of disorganizing distribution and creating chaos. It ended with the words:

“Anyone found hoarding food will be shot on the spot.”

A third announcement read:

“Those who do not belong to the exploiting class are admitted to membership in Consumer Associations. Details are obtainable at the Food Office, Yuriatin Soviet, 5 October Street (formerly Governor Street), Room 137.”

Former members of the military were warned:

“Anyone who fails to surrender his arms or who continues carrying them without having the appropriate new permit will be prosecuted with the utmost severity of the law. New permits are obtainable at the Office of the Yuriatin Revolutionary-Military Committee, 6 October Street, Room 63.”

2

The group in front of the building was joined by a wild-looking, emaciated man, black with grime, with a bag flung over his shoulder, and carrying a stick. There was not yet any white in his long, shaggy hair, but his bristly, dark-blond beard was graying. This was Yurii Andreievich. His fur coat must have been taken from him on the road or perhaps he had bartered it for food. His thin, tattered, short-sleeved coat, which did not keep him warm, was the result of an exchange.

All he had left in his bag was the remnant of a crust of bread that someone had given him out of charity, in a village near the town, and a piece of suet. He had reached Yuriatin somewhat earlier, but it had taken him a whole hour to trudge from the outskirts through which the railway ran to this corner of Merchant Street, so great was his weakness and so much had the last few days of the journey exhausted him. He had often stopped, and he had barely restrained an impulse to fall to his knees and kiss the stones of the town, which he had despaired of ever seeing again, and the sight of which filled him with happiness, like the sight of a friend.

For almost half his journey on foot he had followed the railway track. All of it was out of use, neglected and covered with snow. He had passed train after train abandoned by the Whites; they stood idle, stopped by the defeat of Kolchak, by lack of fuel, and by snowdrifts. Immobilized and buried in the snow, they stretched almost uninterruptedly for miles on end. Some of them served as strongholds for armed bands of highwaymen or as hideouts for escaping criminals or political fugitives—the involuntary vagrants of those days—but most of them had become mortuaries and mass graves for the victims of the cold and of the typhus raging all along the line and mowing down whole villages.

That period confirmed the ancient proverb, “Man is a wolf to man.” Traveller turned off the road at the sight of traveller, stranger meeting stranger killed for fear of being killed. There were isolated cases of cannibalism. The laws of human civilization were suspended. The jungle law was in force. Man dreamed the prehistoric dreams of the cave dweller.

Every now and then Yurii Andreievich would see lonely shadows stealing along the ditch or scurrying across the road ahead of him. He avoided them carefully whenever he could, but many of them seemed familiar. He imagined that he had seen them all at the partisan camp. In most cases he was mistaken, but once his eyes did not deceive him. The boy who darted out of a snowdrift that concealed a train of wagons-lits, relieved himself, and darted back had indeed been a member of the Forest Brotherhood. It was Terentii Galuzin, who was believed to have been shot dead. In reality he had only been wounded and had lost consciousness. When he came to he had crawled away from the place of execution, hidden in the forest until he recovered from his wounds, and was now making his way home to Krestovozdvizhensk under an assumed name, hiding in the buried trains and running at the sight of human beings.

These scenes and incidents had the strangeness of the transcendental, as if they were snatches torn from lives on other planets that had somehow drifted to the earth. Only nature had remained true to history and appeared in the guise it assumed in modern art.

Now and then there was a quiet, pale gray, dark rose evening, with birches, black and fine as script against the afterglow, and black streams faintly clouded over with gray ice flowing between steep white banks of snow blackened at the edges where the running water had eroded them. Such, in an hour or two, would be the evening in Yuriatin: frosty, gray transparent, and as soft as pussy willows.

The doctor meant to read the notices posted on the house of sculptures, but his eyes kept wandering to the third-floor windows of the house across the street. These were the windows of the rooms in which the furniture left by the previous occupants had been stored. Now, although the frost had filmed them at the edges, it was clear that the glass was transparent; the whitewash had evidently been removed. What did this mean? Had the former occupants returned? Or had Lara moved out and new tenants moved in, rearranging everything?

The uncertainty was unbearable. The doctor crossed the street, went in, and climbed the front staircase he knew so well and which was so dear to him. How often at the camp he had recalled the openwork pattern of the cast-iron steps down to the last scroll. In one place you could look through the lumber room in the basement where broken chairs and old pails and tin tubs had been stacked. They were still there; nothing had changed. The doctor was almost grateful to the staircase for its loyalty to the past.

There had been a doorbell once, but it had broken and stopped ringing even before the doctor had been captured by the partisans. He was about to knock when he noticed that there was now a padlock on the door, hanging from two rings roughly screwed into the old oak panels with their fine carving, which in places had come away. Such destructiveness would have been inconceivable in the old days. There would have been a fitted lock, and if it had been out of order there were locksmiths to repair it. This trifling detail was eloquent of the general deterioration of things, which had gone a great deal further in his absence.

The doctor was sure that Lara and Katenka were not at home. Perhaps they were not even in Yuriatin, and perhaps they were not even alive. He was prepared for the worst. It was only in order not to leave a stone unturned that he decided to look for the key in the hollow between the bricks, where a rat had so greatly frightened Katenka. He kicked at the wall, to make sure of not putting his hand on one now. He had not the slightest hope of finding anything. The hollow was closed by a brick. He removed it and felt inside. Oh, miracle! A key and a note! It was a long note covering a large sheet of paper. He toot it to the window on the landing. Another miracle, even more unbelievable! The note was addressed to him! He read it quickly:

“Lord, what happiness! They say you are alive and have turned up. Someone saw you near the town and rushed over to tell me. I take it you’ll go straight to Varykino, so I’m going there with Katenka. But just in case, I’m leaving the key in the usual place. Wait for me, don’t move. You’ll see I am using the front rooms now. The flat is rather empty, I’ve had to sell some of the furniture. I’ve left a little food, boiled potatoes mostly. Put the lid back on the saucepan with a weight on it, to keep the rats out. I’m mad with joy.”

He read to the bottom of the page, and did not notice that the letter continued on the back. He pressed it to his lips, folded it, and put it into his pocket with the key. Mixed with his immense joy, he felt a sharp, stabbing pain. Since Lara was going to Varykino, and not even bothering to explain, it must be that his family were not there. He felt not only anxious because of this, but unbearably aggrieved and sad about them. Why hadn’t she said a single word of how and where they were?—as if they didn’t exist at all!

But it was getting darker, and he had still many things to do while it was light. One of the most urgent was to read the texts of the decrees posted in the street. It was no trifling matter in those days to be ignorant of the regulations; it might cost you your life. Without going into the flat or taking off his bag, he went down and crossed the street, to the wall thickly covered with various announcements.

3

There were newspaper articles, texts of speeches at meetings, and decrees. Yurii Andreievich glanced at the headings. “Requisitioning, assessment, and taxation of members of the propertied classes.” “Establishment of workers’ control.” “Factory and plant committees.” These were the regulations the new authorities had issued on entering the town in place of those that had been in force. No doubt, Yurii Andreievich thought, they were intended as a reminder of the uncompromising nature of the new regime, in case it had been forgotten under the Whites. But these monotonous, endless repetitions made his head go around. What period did they belong to? That of the first upheaval, or of some later re-establishment of the regime after a White rebellion? Had they been composed last year? The year before? Only once in his life had this uncompromising language and single-mindedness filled him with enthusiasm. Was it possible that he must pay for that rash enthusiasm all his life by never hearing, year after year, anything but these unchanging, shrill, crazy exclamations and demands, which became progressively more impractical, meaningless, and unfulfillable as time went by? Was it possible that because of one moment of overgenerous response he had been enslaved forever?

His eyes lit on a fragment of a speech:

“The reports on the famine disclose the unbelievable inactivity of the local organizations. There are glaring abuses, there is speculation on a gigantic scale, but what are our regional and municipal factory committees doing? Only mass searches in the commercial districts of Yuriatin and Razvilie, only terror applied in all its harshness, down to the shooting of speculators on the spot, can deliver us from famine.”

“What an enviable blindness!” thought the doctor. “To be able to talk of bread when it has long since vanished from the face of the earth! Of propertied classes and speculators when they have long since been abolished by earlier decrees! Of peasants and villages that no longer exist! Don’t they remember their own plans and measures, which long since turned life upside down? What kind of people are they, to go on raving with this never-cooling, feverish ardor, year in, year out, on nonexistent, long-vanished subjects, and to know nothing, to see nothing around them?”

The doctor’s head was spinning. He fainted and fell down unconscious on the sidewalk. When he came to and people helped him to get up and offered to take him where he wished to go, he thanked them and refused, saying he had only to cross the street.

4

He went up again, and this time he unlocked the door of Lara’s flat. It was still light on the landing, no darker than before he had gone out. He was glad that the sun was not hurrying him.

The creaking of the door touched off a commotion inside. The uninhabited flat greeted him with the clang and rattle of falling tin pans. Rats, scuttling off the shelves, plopped onto the floor and scattered. They must have bred here by the thousands. The doctor felt sick and helpless to deal with this abomination and decided to barricade himself for the night in one room with a closely fitting door, where he could stop the ratholes with broken glass.

He turned left to the part of the flat that he did not know, crossed a dark passage, and came into a light room with two windows facing the street. Directly opposite the window was the gray building with the statues; groups of people stood with their back to him, reading the announcements.

The light in the room was of the same quality as outside, it was the same new, fresh evening light of early spring. This seemed to make the room a part of the street; the only difference was that Lara’s bedroom, where he was standing, was colder than the street.

His sudden weakness earlier that afternoon as he approached the town and walked through it an hour or two ago had made Yurii Andreievich think that he was ill, and had filled him with fears. Now, the sameness of the light in the house and in the street exhilarated him. Bathed in the same chilled air as the passers-by, he felt a kinship with them, an identity with the mood of the town, with life in the world. This dispelled his fears. He no longer thought he would be ill. The transparency of the spring evening, the all-penetrating light were a good omen, a promise of generous fulfillment of distant and far-reaching hopes. All would be well, he would achieve all he wanted in life, he would find and reunite and reconcile them all, he would think everything out and find all the right words. He waited for the joy of seeing Lara as an immediate proof that all the rest would follow.

A wild excitement and an uncontrollable restlessness supplanted his earlier fatigue. In reality this animation was an even surer symptom of approaching illness than his recent weakness. Yurii Andreievich could not sit still. Once again he felt the urge to go out.

He wanted, before he settled down, to have a haircut and get rid of his beard. He had looked for a barber earlier, on his way through town. But some of the barbershops he had known before stood empty, others had changed hands and were used for other purposes, and those still in business were locked. He had no razor of his own. Scissors would have done the job, but though he turned everything upside down on Lara’s dressing table, in his haste he did not find any.

Now it occurred to him that there had once been a tailor’s workshop in Spassky Street; if it still existed and he got to it before closing time, he might borrow a pair of scissors. He walked out.

5

His memory had not failed him. The workshop was still there, with its entrance from the street and a window running the width of the front. The seamstresses worked in full view of the passers-by. You could see right into the back of the room.

It was packed with sewing women. In addition to the seamstresses there were probably aging local ladies who knew how to sew and had obtained jobs in order to become entitled to the workbooks mentioned in the proclamation on the wall of the gray building.

It was easy to tell them from the professionals. The work shop made nothing but army clothes, padded trousers and jackets and parti-colored fur coats, made of the skins of dogs of different breeds, such as Yurii Andreievich had seen on the partisans. This work, more suitable for furriers, was particularly hard on the amateurs, whose fingers looked all thumbs as they pushed the stiffly folded hems through the sewing machines.

Yurii Andreievich knocked on the window and made signs that he wished to be let in. The women replied by signs that no private orders were accepted. He persisted. The women motioned him to go away and leave them alone, they had urgent work to do. One of them made a puzzled face, held up her hand, palm out, like a little boat, in a gesture of annoyance, and questioned with her eyes what on earth he wanted. He snipped two fingers like scissor blades. This was not understood. They decided it was some impertinence, that he was mimicking them and making fun of them. Standing out there, torn and tattered and behaving so oddly, he looked like a madman. The girls giggled and waved him on. At last he thought of going around the house, through the yard, and knocking on the back door.

6

It was opened by a dark, elderly, stern woman in a dark dress who might have been the head seamstress.

“What a pest you are. Can’t you leave us alone? Well, get on with it, what is it you want?”

“I want scissors. Don’t be so surprised. I’d like to borrow a pair of scissors to cut my hair and my beard. I could do it here and give them back to you at once, it wouldn’t take a minute. I’d be terribly grateful.”

The woman looked astonished and mistrustful. She clearly doubted his sanity.

“I’ve just arrived from a long journey. I wanted to get a haircut but there isn’t a single barbershop open. So I thought I’d do it myself, but I haven’t any scissors. Would you kindly lend me some?”

“All right. I’ll give you a haircut. But I warn you. If you’ve got something else in mind—any tricks such as changing your appearance to disguise yourself for political reasons—don’t blame us if we report you. We are not risking our lives for you.”

“For heaven’s sake! What an idea!”

She let him in and took him into a side room little bigger than a closet; next moment he was sitting in a chair with a sheet wrapped around him. and tucked under his chin as at the barber’s. The seamstress went out of the room and came back with a pair of scissors, a comb, clippers, a strap, and a razor.

“I’ve done every kind of job in my life,” she explained, noticing her client’s astonishment. “At one time I was a hairdresser. I learned haircutting and shaving when I was a nurse in the other war. Now we’ll snip off that beard and then we’ll have a shave.”

“Could you cut my hair very short, please?”

“I’ll do my best. Why are you pretending to be so ignorant, an educated man like you? As if you didn’t know that we now count time by the decade and not by the week, and today is the seventeenth of the month and the barbers have their day off on every date with a seven in it.”

“Honestly I didn’t know. I’ve told you, I’ve just come from a long way off. Why should I pretend anything?”

“Don’t fidget or you’ll get cut. So you’ve just arrived. How did you come?”

“On my feet.”

“Along the highway?”

“Partly that, partly along the railway track. I don’t know how many trains I’ve seen, all buried in the snow. Luxury trains, special trains, every kind of train you can think of.”

“There, just this little bit to snip off and it’s finished. Family business?”

“Heavens, no! I worked for a former union of credit co-operatives as their travelling inspector. They sent me on an inspection tour to eastern Siberia and there I got stuck. No chance of a train, as you know. There was nothing for it but to walk. Six weeks, it took me. I can’t begin to tell you all I’ve seen on the way.”

“If I were you, I wouldn’t begin. I see I’ll have to teach you a thing or two. Have a look at yourself first. Here’s a mirror. Get your hand out from under the sheet and hold it. All right?”

“I don’t think it’s quite short enough. Couldn’t you take off a bit more?”

“It won’t stay tidy if it’s any shorter. As I was saying, don’t start telling anything at all. It’s better to keep your mouth shut. Credit co-operatives, luxury trains, inspection tours—forget all about such things. It isn’t the moment for them. You could get into no end of trouble. Better pretend you are a doctor or a schoolteacher. There now—beard cut off, now we’ll shave it clean. Just a spot of lather and you’ll be ten years younger. I’ll go and boil the kettle.”

“Whoever can she be?” Yurii Andreievich wondered. He had a feeling he had some connection with her—something he had seen or heard, someone she reminded him of—but he could not think who it was.

She came back with the hot water.

“Now we’ll have a shave. As I was telling you, it’s much better not to say a word. Speech is of silver, silence is gold. That has always been true. And your special trains and credit co-operatives—better think of something else, say you are a doctor or a teacher. As for seeing sights, keep that to yourself. Whom are you going to impress these days? Am I hurting you?”

“A little.”

“It scrapes a bit, I know, it can’t be helped. Just a little bit of patience, my dear man. Your skin isn’t used to the razor and your beard is very coarse. It won’t take a minute. Yes. There’s nothing people haven’t seen. They’ve been through everything. We’ve had our troubles, too. The things that went on under the Whites! Murder, rape, abduction, man hunts. There was one little lordling who took a dislike to an ensign. He sent soldiers to ambush him in a wood outside the town, near Krapulsky’s house. They got him and disarmed him and took him under guard to Razvilie. In those days Razvilie was the same as the regional Cheka is nowadays—a place of execution. Why are you jerking your head like that? It scrapes, does it? I know, my dear, I know. It can’t be helped. Your hair is just like bristles. There’s just this one tough place. Well, the ensign’s wife was in hysterics. ‘Kolia! Kolia! What will become of my Kolia!’ Off she went, straight to the top, to General Galiullin. That’s in a manner of speaking, of course. She couldn’t get straight to him. You had to pull strings. There was somebody in the next street over there who knew how to reach him, an exceptionally kind person, very sensitive, not like anyone else, always stood up for people. You can’t think what went on all over the place, lynchings, atrocities, dramas of jealousy. Just as in Spanish novels.”

“That’s Lara she’s talking about,” thought Yurii Andreievich. But he kept prudently silent and did not ask for details. Her absurd remark about the Spanish novels again oddly reminded him of something—precisely by its absurdity and irrelevance—but he still couldn’t think what it was.

“Now, of course, it’s all quite different. Admittedly there’s any amount of investigations, informing, shooting, and so on. But the idea is quite different. To begin with, it’s a new government, it’s only just come into power, it hasn’t got into its stride yet. And then, whatever you say, they are on the side of the common people, that’s their strength. In our family we are four sisters, counting myself, all working women. It’s natural that we should be drawn to them. One sister died. Her husband was a political exile, worked as manager at one of the local factories. Their son—my nephew, that is—he’s at the head of the peasant forces—he’s quite a celebrity.”

“So that’s who she is,” Yurii Andreievich realized. “Liberius’s aunt, Mikulitsyn’s sister-in-law, the one who is a local legend, barber—seamstress—signal woman—Jack of all trades!” But he decided to say nothing so as not to give himself away.

“My nephew was always drawn to the people, ever since his childhood. He grew up among the workers at the factory. Perhaps you’ve heard of the Varykino factories? Now look at what I’ve done, fool that I am. Half your chin is smooth and the other half is bristly. That’s what comes of talking. Why didn’t you stop me? Now the lather’s dry and the water is cold. I’ll go and warm it up.”

When she came back, Yurii Andreievich asked: “Varykino, that’s somewhere miles out in the country, isn’t it? That should have been safe enough in all these upheavals.”

“Well, it wasn’t exactly safe. They had it worse than we did in some ways. They had some sort of armed bands out there, nobody quite knows what they were. They didn’t speak our language. They went through the place, house by house, shot everyone they found and went off again, without a by-your-leave. The corpses just stayed in the snow. That was in the winter, of course. Do stop jerking your head, I nearly cut you.”

“You were saying your brother-in-law lived in Varykino. Was he there when all this happened?”

“No. God is merciful. He and his wife got out in time—that’s his second wife. Where they are, nobody knows, but it’s certain that they escaped. There were some new people there as well, strangers from Moscow. They left even earlier. The younger of the two men, a doctor, the head of the family, he’s missing. That’s in a manner of speaking, of course; it was called ‘missing’ to spare their feelings. Actually he must be dead—sure to have been killed. They kept looking and looking for him, but he never turned up. In the meantime the other one, the older of the two, he was called back home. A professor he was, an agronomist. The government called him back, I was told. They all stopped in Yuriatin on their way to Moscow, just before the Whites came back. Now you’re at it again, twisting and jerking. You really make me cut your throat. You get your money’s worth out of your barber, my dear man.”

So they were in Moscow!

7

“In Moscow! In Moscow!” The words echoed in his heart at every step of the cast-iron stairs, as he climbed them for the third time. The empty flat again met him with the hellish din of scampering, flopping, racing rats. It was clear to Yurii Andreievich that, however tired he was, he would never get to sleep unless he could keep this abomination away from him. The first thing before settling down for the night was to stop the ratholes. Fortunately, there were fewer of them in the bedroom than in the rest of the flat, where the floor boards and skirtings were in a worse state. But he had to hurry. It was getting dark. It was true that a lamp stood on the kitchen table—perhaps in expectation of his coming it had been taken down from its bracket and half filled with kerosene, and a match box with a few matches in it had been left out. But it was better to save both the matches and the kerosene. In the bedroom he found a small oil lamp; the rats had been at the oil but a little was left.

In some places the skirting had come away from the floor. It took him a little over an hour to pack the cracks with broken glass. The door fitted well, and once it was closed the bedroom should be ratproof.

There was a Dutch stove in a corner of the room, with a tiled cornice not quite reaching the ceiling. In the kitchen there was a stack of logs. Yurii Andreievich decided to rob Lara of a couple of armfuls and, getting down on one knee, he gathered them up and balanced them on his left arm. Carrying them into the bedroom, he stacked them near the stove and had a look inside to see how it worked and in what condition it was. He had meant to lock the door but the latch was broken; he wedged it firmly with paper; then he laid the fire at his leisure and lit it.

As he put in more logs, he noticed that the cross section of one of them was marked with the letters “K.D.” He recognized them with surprise. In the old Krueger days when timber rejected by the factories was sold for fuel, the boles were stamped before they were cut up into sections to show where they came from. “K.D.” stood for Kulabish Division in Varykino.

The discovery upset him. These logs in Lara’s house must mean that she was in touch with Samdeviatov and that he provided for her as he had once supplied the doctor and his household with all their needs. He had always found it irksome to accept his help. Now his embarrassment at being in his debt was complicated by other feelings.

It was hardly likely that Samdeviatov helped Lara out of sheer goodness of heart. He thought of Samdeviatov’s free and easy ways and of Lara’s rashness as a woman. There must surely be something between them.

The dry Kulabish logs crackled merrily and stormed into a blaze, and, as they caught, Yurii Andreievich’s blind jealousy turned from the merest suppositions into certainty.

But so tormented was he on every side that one anxiety drove out another. He could not get rid of his suspicions, but his mind leapt from subject to subject, and the thought of his family, flooding it again, submerged for a time his jealous fantasies.

“So you are in Moscow, my dear ones?” It seemed to him now that the seamstress had given him an assurance of their safe arrival. “So you made all that long journey once again, and this time without me. How did you manage on the way? Why was Alexander Alexandrovich called back? Was it to return to his chair at the Academy? How did you find the house? How silly of me! I don’t even know whether the house is still standing. Lord, how hard and painful it all is! If only I could stop thinking. I can’t think straight. What’s the matter with me, Tonia? I think I’m ill. What will become of us? What will become of you, Tonia, Tonia darling, Tonia? And Sashenka? And Alexander Alexandrovich? And myself? Why hast Thou cast me off? O Light everlasting! Why are we always separated, my dear ones? Why are you always being swept away from me? But we’ll be together again, we’ll be reunited, won’t we, darling? I’ll find you, even if I have to walk all the way to get to you. We’ll see each other, we’ll be together, we’ll be all right again, won’t we?

“Why doesn’t the earth swallow me up, why am I such a monster that I keep forgetting that Tonia was to have another child, and that she has surely had it? This isn’t the first time I’ve forgotten it. How did she get through her confinement? To think that they all stopped in Yuriatin on their way to Moscow! It’s true that Lara didn’t know them, but here is a complete stranger, a seamstress, a hairdresser who has heard all about them, and Lara says nothing about them in her note. How could she be so careless, so indifferent? It’s as strange as her saying nothing about knowing Samdeviatov.”

Yurii Andreievich now looked around the room with a new discernment. All its furnishings belonged to the unknown tenants who had long been absent and in hiding. There was nothing of Lara’s among them, and they could tell him nothing of her tastes. The photographs on the walls were of strangers. However that might be, he suddenly felt uncomfortable under the eyes of all these men and women. The clumsy furniture breathed hostility. He felt alien and unwanted in this bedroom.

What a fool he had been to keep remembering this house and missing it, what a fool to have come into this room not as into an ordinary room but as if into the heart of his longing for Lara! How silly his way of feeling would seem to anyone outside! How different was the way strong, practical, efficient, handsome males, such as Samdeviatov, lived and spoke and acted! And why should Lara be expected to prefer his weakness and the dark, obscure, unrealistic language of his love? Did she need this confusion? Did she herself want to be what she was to him?

And what was she to him, as he had just put it? Oh, that question he could always answer.

A spring evening. The air punctuated with scattered sounds. The voices of children playing in the streets coming from varying distances as if to show that the whole expanse is alive. And this vast expanse is Russia, his incomparable mother; famed far and wide, martyred, stubborn, extravagant, crazy, irresponsible, adored, Russia with her eternally splendid, and disastrous, and unpredictable adventures. Oh, how sweet to be alive! How good to be alive and to love life! Oh, the ever-present longing to thank life, thank existence itself, to thank them as one being to another being.

This was exactly what Lara was. You could not communicate with life and existence, but she was their representative, their expression, in her the inarticulate principle of existence became sensitive and capable of speech.

And all that he had just reproached her with in a moment of doubt was untrue, a thousand times untrue! Everything about her was perfect, flawless.

Tears of admiration and repentance filled his eyes. Opening the stove door, he poked the fire; he pushed the logs that were ablaze and had turned into pure heat to the back and brought forward into the draft those that were less incandescent. Leaving the door open, he sat before the open flames, delighting in the play of light and the warmth on his face and hands. The warmth and light brought him completely to his senses. He missed Lara unbearably and he longed for something that could bring him into touch with her at that very moment.

He drew her crumpled letter from his pocket. It was folded so that the back of the page he had read earlier was outside, and now he saw that there was something written on it. Smoothing it out, he read it by the dancing firelight:

“You surely know what’s happened to your family. They are in Moscow. Tonia has had a little girl.” After that several lines were crossed out, then: “I’ve crossed it out because it’s silly to write about it. We’ll talk our fill when we meet. I’m rushing out, I must get hold of a horse. I don’t know what I’ll do if I can’t. It’s so difficult with Katenka. ...” The rest of the sentence was smudged and illegible.

“She got the horse from Samdeviatov,” Yurii Andreievich reflected calmly. “If she had anything to conceal, she wouldn’t have mentioned it.”

8

When the stove was hot Yurii Andreievich closed the flue and had something to eat. After that he felt so sleepy that he lay down on the sofa without undressing and at once fell fast asleep. The loud, insolent noise of the rats behind the walls and the door did not reach him. He had two bad dreams, one after the other.

He was in Moscow in a room with a glass door. The door was locked. For greater safety he was keeping hold of it by the handle and pulling it toward himself. From the other side, his little boy, Sashenka, dressed in a sailor suit and cap, was knocking, crying and begging to be let in. Behind the child, splashing him and the door with its spray, there was a waterfall. It was making a tremendous noise. Either the water was pouring from a burst pipe (a usual occurrence in those days) or else the door was a barrier against some wild countryside, a mountain gorge filled with the sound of its raging torrent and the millennial cold and darkness of its caves.

The noise of the tumbling water terrified the boy. It drowned his cries, but Yurii Andreievich could see him trying, over and over again, to form the word “Daddy” with his lips.

Heartbroken, Yurii Andreievich longed with all his being to take the boy in his arms, press him to his chest, and run away with him as fast as his feet would carry him.

Yet, with tears pouring down his face he kept hold of the handle of the locked door, shutting out the child, sacrificing him to a false notion of honor, in the name of his alleged duty to another woman, who was not the child’s mother and who might at any moment come into the room from another door.

He woke up drenched in sweat and tears. “I’ve got a fever, I am sick,” he thought. “This isn’t typhus. This is some sort of exhaustion that is taking the form of a dangerous illness—an illness with a crisis, it will be just like any serious infection, and the only question is which is going to win, life or death. But I’m too sleepy to think.” He dropped off to sleep again.

He dreamed of a dark winter morning in a bustling Moscow street. Judging by the early morning traffic, the trolleys ringing their bells, and the yellow pools of lamplight on the gray snow-covered street, it was before the revolution.

He dreamed of a big apartment with many windows, all on the same side of the house, probably no higher than the third story, with drawn curtains reaching to the floor.

Inside, people were lying about asleep in their clothes like travellers, and the rooms were untidy like a railway car, with half-eaten legs and wings of roast chicken and other remnants of food scattered about on greasy bits of newspaper. The shoes that the many friends, relatives, callers, and homeless people, all sheltering in the apartment, had removed for the night, were standing in pairs on the floor. The hostess, Lara, in a dressing gown tied hastily around her waist, moved swiftly and silently from room to room, hurrying about her chores, and he was following her step by step, muttering clumsy irrelevant explanations and generally making a nuisance of himself. But she no longer had a moment to give him and took no notice of his mutterings except for turning to him now and then with a tranquil, puzzled look or bursting into her inimitable, candid, silvery laughter. This was the only form of intimacy that remained between them. And how distant, cold, and compellingly attractive was this woman to whom he had sacrificed all he had, whom he had preferred to everything, and in comparison with whom everything seemed to him worthless!

9

It was not he but something greater than himself that wept and sobbed in him, and shone in the darkness with bright, phosphorescent words. And with weeping soul, he too wept. He felt pity for himself.

“I am ill,” he realized in intervals of clarity between sleep, and delirium, and unconsciousness. “I must have some form of typhus that isn’t described in textbooks, that we didn’t study at school. I ought to get myself something to eat or I’ll die of starvation.”

But the moment he tried to raise himself on his elbow he found that he was incapable of moving, and fainted or fell asleep.

“How long have I been lying here?” he wondered during one such interval of clarity. “How many hours? How many days? When I lay down it was early spring. But now the windows are so thick with hoarfrost that the room is dark.”

In the kitchen, rats were rattling the plates, scurrying up the walls, and heavily flopping down and squealing in their disgusting contralto voices.

And he again fell asleep, and on awakening discovered that the snowy windows had filled with a pink light, glowing like red wine in crystal glasses. And he wondered whether it was dawn or dusk.

Once he thought he heard voices near him and was terrified, imagining that he was going mad. Crying with self-pity, he complained in a soundless whisper that Heaven had abandoned him. “Why hast Thou cast me off, O Light everlasting, and cast me down into the darkness of hell?”

Suddenly he realized that he was not delirious, that he no longer had his clothes on, that he had been washed and was in a clean shirt, lying not on the sofa but in a freshly made bed, and that sitting beside him, leaning over him, her hair mingling with his and her tears falling with his own, was Lara. He fainted with joy.

10

He had complained that Heaven had cast him off, but now the whole breadth of heaven leaned low over his bed, holding out two strong, white, woman’s arms to him. His head swimming with joy, he fell into a bottomless depth of bliss as one who drops unconscious.

All his life he had been active, doing things about the house, looking after patients, thinking, studying, writing. How good it was to stop doing, struggling, thinking, to leave it all for a time to nature, to become her thing, her concern, the work of her merciful, wonderful, beauty-lavishing hands.

His recovery was rapid. Lara fed him, nursed him, surrounded him with her care, and her dazzling loveliness, her questions and answers, whispered in a warm, gentle voice, were always present.

Their subdued conversations, however casual, were as full of meaning as the dialogues of Plato.

Even more than by what they had in common, they were united by what separated them from the rest of the world. They were both equally repelled by what was tragically typical of modern man, his textbook admirations, his shrill enthusiasms, and the deadly dullness conscientiously preached and practiced by countless workers in the field of art and science in order that genius should remain a great rarity.

Their love was great. Most people experience love without becoming aware of the extraordinary nature of this emotion. But to them—and this made them exceptional—the moments when passion visited their doomed human existence like a breath of eternity were moments of revelation, of continually new discoveries about themselves and life.

11

“Of course you must go back to your family. I won’t keep you a day more than necessary. But just look at what is going on. As soon as we became part of Soviet Russia we were sucked into its ruin. To keep going, they take everything from us. You have no idea of how much Yuriatin has changed while you were ill. Our supplies are sent to Moscow—for them it’s a drop in the ocean, all these shipments simply vanish down a bottomless pit—and in the meantime nothing is left to us. There are no mails, there is no passenger service, all the trains are used for bread. There’s a lot of grumbling going on in town, as there was before the Haida uprising, and once again, the Cheka is savagely putting down the slightest sign of discontent.

“How could you travel, weak as you are, nothing but skin and bones? Do you really imagine you could go on foot? You would never get there. When you are stronger, it will be different.

“I won’t presume to give you advice, but in your place I would take a job for the time being. Work at your own profession—they’d like that. You might get something in the regional health service.

“You’ll have to do something. Your father was a Siberian millionaire who committed suicide, your wife is the daughter of a local landowner and industrialist, you were with the partisans and you ran away. You can’t get around it—you left the ranks of the revolutionary army, you’re a deserter. Under no circumstances must you remain idle. I am not in a much better position myself. I’ll have to do something too. I’m living on a volcano as it is.”

“How do you mean? What about Strelnikov?”

“It’s precisely because of him. I told you before that he has many enemies. Now that the Red Army is victorious those non-Party soldiers who got too near the top and knew too much are done for. Lucky if they’re only thrown out and not killed so as to leave no trace. Pasha is particularly vulnerable; he is in very great danger. You know he was out in the East. I’ve heard he’s run away. He’s in hiding. They’re hunting for him. But don’t let’s talk about it. I hate crying, and if I say another word about him I know I’ll howl.”

“You were very much in love with him? You still are?”

“I married him, he’s my husband, Yurochka. He has a wonderful, upright, shining personality. I am very much at fault. It isn’t that I ever did him any harm, it wouldn’t be true to say that. But he is so outstanding, so big, he has such immense integrity—and I’m no good at all, I’m nothing in comparison. That’s where my fault lies. But please let’s not talk about it now. I’ll tell you more some other time, I promise you I will.

“How lovely your Tonia is. Just like a Botticelli. I was there when she had her baby. We got on terribly well. But let’s not talk about that either just at the moment!

“As I was saying, let’s both get jobs. We’ll go out to work every morning, and at the end of the month we’ll collect our salaries in billions of rubles. You know, until quite recently the old Siberian bank notes were still valid. Then they were declared invalid and for a long time, all the time you were ill, we had no currency at all! Just imagine! Well, we managed somehow. Now they say a whole trainload of new bank notes has arrived, at least forty carfuls! They are printed on big sheets in two colors, red and blue, and divided into little squares like postage stamps. The blue squares are worth five million rubles each and the red ones ten. They are badly printed, they fade and the colors are smudged.”

“Yes, I’ve seen that kind of money. It was put into circulation in Moscow just before we left.”

12

“Why were you so long in Varykino? Is there anybody there? I thought there wasn’t a soul, it was deserted. What kept you so long?”

“I was cleaning your house with Katenka. I thought you’d go there first thing and I didn’t want you to see it in the state it was in.”

“Why, what kind of state is it in? Is it so bad?”

“It was untidy, dirty, and we put it straight.”

“How evasively terse! I feel there’s something you are not telling me. But just as you like, I won’t try to get it out of you. Tell me about Tonia. What did they call the little girl?”

“Masha, in memory of your mother.”

“Tell me all about them.”

“Please, not now. I’ve told you, I still can’t talk about it without crying.”

“That Samdeviatov who lent you the horse, he’s an interesting character, don’t you think?”

“Very.”

“I know him quite well, you know. He was in and out of the house when we lived there. It was all new to us and he helped us to settle in.”

“I know, he told me.”

“You must be great friends. Is he trying to help you, too?”

“He positively showers me with kindness! I don’t know what I should do without him.”

“I can imagine! I suppose you’re on informal, comradely terms. Does he run after you much?”

“All the time! Naturally!”

“And you like him? Sorry. I shouldn’t have asked you that. I’ve got no business to question you. That was going too far! I apologize.”

“Oh, that’s all right! I suppose what you really mean is, what kind of terms are we on? Is there anything more between us than friendship? Of course there isn’t! He has done a tremendous amount for me, I am enormously in his debt, but if he gave me my weight in gold, if he gave his life for me, it wouldn’t bring me a step nearer to him. I have always disliked men of that kind, I have nothing whatever in common with them. These resourceful, self-confident, masterful characters—in practical things they are invaluable, but in matters of feeling I can think of nothing more horrible than all this impertinent, male complacency! It certainly isn’t my idea of life and love! More than that, morally Anfim reminds me of someone else, of someone infinitely more repulsive. It’s his fault that I’ve become what I am.”

“I don’t understand. What do you think you are? What have you got in mind? Explain to me. You are the best person in the world.”

“How can you, Yurochka! I am talking seriously, and you pay me compliments as though we were in a drawing room. What am I like? There’s something broken in me, there’s something broken in my whole life. I discovered life much too early, I was made to discover it, and I was made to see it from the very worst side—a cheap, distorted version of it—through the eyes of a self-assured, elderly parasite, who took advantage of everything and allowed himself whatever he fancied.”

“I think I understand. I thought there was something. But wait a moment. I can imagine your suffering as a child, a suffering much beyond your years, the shock to your inexperience, a very young girl’s sense of outrage. But all that is in the past. What I mean is that it isn’t for you to make yourself unhappy about it now, it’s for people who love you, people like myself. It’s I who should be tearing my hair because I wasn’t with you to prevent it, if it really makes you unhappy. It’s a curious thing. I think I can be really jealous—deadly, passionately jealous—only of my inferiors, people with whom I have nothing in common. A rival whom I look up to arouses entirely different feelings in me. I think if a man whom I understood and liked were in love with the same woman as I am I wouldn’t feel a grievance, or want to quarrel with him, I would feel a sort of tragic brotherhood with him. Naturally, I wouldn’t dream of sharing the woman I loved. But I would give her up and my suffering would be something different from jealousy—less raw and angry. It would be the same if I came across an artist who was doing the same sort of thing as I do and doing it better. I would probably give up my own efforts, I wouldn’t want to duplicate his, and there would be no point in going on if his were better.

“But that wasn’t what we were talking about. I don’t think I could love you so much if you had nothing to complain of and nothing to regret. I don’t like people who have never fallen or stumbled. Their virtue is lifeless and of little value. Life hasn’t revealed its beauty to them.”

“It’s this beauty I’m thinking of. I think that to see it your imagination has to be intact, your vision has to be childlike. That is what I was deprived of. I might have developed my own view of life if I hadn’t, right from the beginning, seen it stamped in someone else’s vulgar distortion. And that isn’t all. It’s because of the intrusion into my life, right at the start, of this immoral, selfish nonentity that when later on I married a man who was really big and remarkable, and who loved me and whom I loved, my marriage was destroyed.”

“Wait a moment before you tell me about your husband. I am not jealous of him. I told you I can be jealous only of my inferiors, not of my equals. Tell me first about this other man.”

“Which man?”

“This wrecker who spoiled our life. Who was he?”

“A fairly well-known Moscow lawyer. A friend of my father’s. When Father died and we were very badly off he gave my mother financial help He was unmarried, rich. I’ve probably made him sound a lot more interesting than he is by painting him so black. He couldn’t be more ordinary. I’ll tell you his name if you like.”

“You needn’t. I know it. I saw him once.”

“Really?”

“In a hotel room, when your mother took poison. It was late at night. You and I were both still at school.”

“Oh, I remember. You came with someone else. You stood in the shadow, in the hallway. I don’t know if I would have remembered by myself, but I think you reminded me of it once, it must have been in Meliuzeievo.”

“Komarovsky was there.”

“Was he? Quite possible. It wasn’t unusual for us to be in the same place. We often saw each other.”

“Why are you blushing?”

“At the sound of Komarovsky’s name coming from you. I’m no longer used to hearing it, I was taken by surprise.”

“There was a school friend of mine who went with me that night, and this is what he told me there in the hotel. He recognized Komarvosky as a man he had happened to see once before. As a child, during a journey, this boy, Misha Gordon, witnessed the suicide of my father—the millionaire industrialist. They were in the same train. Father jumped deliberately from the moving train and was killed. He was accompanied on the journey by Komarovsky, who was his lawyer. He made Father drink, he got his business into a muddle, he brought him to the point of bankruptcy, and he drove him to suicide. It was his fault that my father killed himself and that I was left an orphan.”

“It isn’t possible! It’s extraordinary! Can it really be true? So he was your evil genius, too! It brings us even closer! It must be predestination!”

“He is the man of whom I shall always be incurably, insanely jealous.”

“How can you say such a thing? It isn’t just that I don’t love him—I despise him.”

“Can you know yourself as well as that? Human nature, and particularly woman’s, is so mysterious and so full of contradictions. Perhaps there is something in your loathing that keeps you in subjection to him more than to any man whom you love of your own free will, without compulsion.”

“What a terrible thing to say! And as usual, the way you put it makes me feel that this thing, unnatural as it is, seems to be true. But how horrible if it is!”

“Don’t be upset. Don’t listen to me. I only meant that I am jealous of a dark, unconscious element, something irrational, unfathomable. I am jealous of your toilet articles, of the drops of sweat on your skin, of the germs in the air you breathe which could get into your blood and poison you. And I am jealous of Komarovsky, as if he were an infectious disease. Someday he will take you away, just as certainly as death will someday separate us. I know this must seem obscure and confused, but I can’t say it more clearly. I love you madly, irrationally, infinitely.”

13

“Tell me more about your husband—‘One writ with me in sour misfortune’s book,’ as Shakespeare says.”

“Where did he say that?”

“In Romeo and Juliet.”

“I told you a lot in Meliuzeievo when I was looking for him, and then here, when I heard how his men arrested you and took you to his train. I may have told you—or perhaps I only thought I did—how I once saw him from a distance when he was getting into his car. But you can imagine how many guards there were around him! I found him almost unchanged. The same handsome, honest, resolute face, the most honest face I’ve ever seen in my life. The same manly, straightforward character, not a shadow of affectation or make-believe. And yet I did notice a difference, and it alarmed me.

“It was as if something abstract had crept into this face and made it colorless. As if a living human face had become an embodiment of a principle, the image of an idea. My heart sank when I noticed it. I realized that this had happened to him because he had handed himself over to a superior force, but a force that is deadening, and pitiless and will not spare him in the end. It seemed to me that he was a marked man and that this was the seal of his doom. But perhaps I’m confused about it. Perhaps I’m influenced by what you said when you described your meeting with him. After all, in addition to what we feel for each other, I am influenced by you in so many ways!”

“Tell me about your life with him before the revolution.”

“Very early, when I was still a child, purity became my ideal. He was the embodiment of it. You know we grew up almost in the same house. He, Galiullin, and I. As a little boy he was infatuated with me. He used almost to faint whenever he saw me. I probably shouldn’t be talking this way. But it would be worse to pretend I didn’t know. It was the kind of all-absorbing childish passion that a child conceals because his pride won’t let him show it, but one look at his face is enough to tell you all about it. We saw a lot of each other. He and I were as different as you and I are alike. I chose him then and there in my heart. I decided that as soon as we were old enough I would marry this wonderful boy, and in my own mind I became engaged to him.

“You know it’s extraordinary how gifted he is! His father was a signal man, or a crossing guard, I don’t know which, and by sheer brains and hard work he reached, I was going to say the level, but it’s more like the summit, of present academic knowledge in two fields—classics and mathematics! After all, that’s something!”

“But then what spoiled your marriage, if you loved each other so much?”

“Ah, that’s hard to answer. I’ll try to tell you. But it’s strange that I, an ordinary woman, should explain to you, who are so wise, what is happening to human life in general and to life in Russia and why families get broken up, including yours and mine. Ah, it isn’t a matter of individuals, of being alike or different in temperament, of loving or not loving! All customs and traditions, all our way of life, everything to do with home and order, has crumbled into dust in the general upheaval and reorganization of society. The whole human way of life has been destroyed and ruined. All that’s left is the naked human soul stripped to the last shred, for which nothing has changed because it was always cold and shivering and reaching out to its nearest neighbor, as cold and lonely as itself. You and I are like Adam and Eve, the first two people on earth who at the beginning of the world had nothing to cover themselves with—and now at the end of it we are just as naked and homeless. And you and I are the last remembrance of all that immeasurable greatness which has been created in the world in all the thousands of years between them and us, and it is in memory of all those vanished marvels that we live and love and weep and cling to one another.”

14

She was silent for a while, then she went on more calmly:

“I’ll tell you. If Strelnikov became Pashenka again, if he stopped his raging and rebelling; if time turned back; if by some miracle, somewhere, I could see the window of our house shining, the lamplight on Pasha’s desk and his books, even if it were at the end of the earth—I would crawl to it on my knee’s. Everything in me would respond. I could never hold out against the call of the past, of loyalty. There is nothing I wouldn’t sacrifice, however precious. Even you. Even our love, so carefree, so spontaneous, so natural. Oh, forgive me! I don’t mean that. It isn’t true!”

She threw herself into his arms, sobbing. But very soon she controlled herself and, wiping away her tears, said:

“Isn’t it the same call of duty that drives you back to Tonia? Oh, God, how miserable we are! What will become of us? What are we to do?”

When she had recovered she went on:

“But I haven’t answered your question about what it was hat spoiled our happiness. I came to understand it very clearly afterward. I’ll tell you. It isn’t only our story. It has become the fate of many others.”

“Tell me, my love, you who are so wise.”

“We were married two years before the war. We were just beginning to make a life for ourselves, we had just set up our home, when the war broke out. I believe now that the war is to blame for everything, for all the misfortunes that followed and that hound our generation to this day. I remember my childhood well. I can still remember a time when we all accepted the peaceful outlook of the last century. It was taken for granted that you listened to reason, that it was right and natural to do what your conscience told you to do. For a man to die by the hand of another was a rare, an exceptional event, something quite out of the ordinary. Murders happened in plays, newspapers, and detective stories, not in everyday life.

“And then there was the jump from this peaceful, naïve moderation to blood and tears, to mass insanity, and to the savagery of daily, hourly, legalized, rewarded slaughter.

“I suppose one must always pay for such things. You must remember better than I do the beginning of disintegration, how everything began to break down all at once—trains and food supplies in towns, and the foundations of the family, and moral standards.”

“Go on. I know what you’ll say next. How well you see all these things. What a joy to listen to you!”

“It was then that untruth came down on our land of Russia. The main misfortune, the root of all the evil to come, was the loss of confidence in the value of one’s own opinion. People imagined that it was out of date to follow their own moral sense, that they must all sing in chorus, and live by other people’s notions, notions that were being crammed down everybody’s throat. And then there arose the power of the glittering phrase, first the Tsarist, then the revolutionary.

“This social evil became an epidemic. It was catching. And it affected everything, nothing was left untouched by it. Our home, too, became infected. Something went wrong in it. Instead of being natural and spontaneous as we had always been, we began to be idiotically pompous with each other. Something showy, artificial, forced, crept into our conversation—you felt you had to be clever in a certain way about certain world-important themes. How could Pasha, who was so discriminating, so exacting with himself, who distinguished so unerringly between reality and appearance, how could he fail to notice the falsehood that had crept into our lives?

“And at this point he made his fatal, terrible mistake. He mistook the spirit of the times, the social, universal evil, for a private and domestic one. He listened to our clichés, to our unnatural official tone, and he thought it was because he was second-rate, a nonentity, that we talked like this. I suppose you find it incredible that such trivial things could matter so much in our married life. You can’t imagine how important this was, what foolish things this childish nonsense made him do.

“Nobody asked him to go to the war, he went because he imagined himself a burden to us, so that we should be free of him. That was the beginning of all his madness. Out of a sort of misdirected, adolescent vanity he took offense at things at which one doesn’t take offense. He sulked at the course of events. He quarrelled with history. To this day he is trying to get even with it. That’s what makes him so insanely defiant. It’s this stupid ambition that’s driving him to his death. God, if I could only save him!”

“How immensely pure and strong is your love for him! Go on, go on loving him. I’m not jealous of him. I won’t stand in your way.”

15

Summer came and went almost unnoticed. The doctor recovered. While planning to go to Moscow he took not one but three temporary jobs. The rapid devaluation of money made it difficult to make ends meet.

Every morning he got up at daybreak, left the house, and walked down Merchant Street, past the “Giant” movie house as far as the former printing shop of the Urals Cossack Army, now renamed the Red Compositor. At the corner of City Street the door of the town hall bore the notice “Complaints.” He crossed the square, turned into Buianovka Street, and coming to the hospital went in through the back door to the out-patient department of the Army Hospital, where he worked. This was his main job.

Most of his way from Lara’s to the hospital lay in the shadow of spreading trees, past curious little frame houses with steep roofs, decorated doors, and carved and painted patterns around the windows. The house next to the hospital, standing in its own garden, had belonged to Goregliadova, a merchant’s wife. It was faced with glazed, diamond-cut tiles, like the ancient boyar houses in Moscow.

Three or four times a week Yurii Andreievich attended the board meetings of the Yuriatin Health Service in Miassky Street.

At the other end of town stood the former Institute of Gynecology, founded by Samdeviatov’s father in memory of his wife, who had died in childbirth, now renamed the Rosa Luxemburg Institute, where Yurii Andreievich lectured on general pathology and one or two optional subjects as part of the new, shortened course of medicine and surgery.

Coming home at night, hungry and tired, he found Lara busy at her domestic chores, cooking and washing. In this prosaic, weekday aspect of her being, dishevelled, with her sleeves rolled and her skirts tucked up, she almost frightened him by her regal attractiveness, more breath-taking than if he had found her on the point of going to a ball, taller in high-heeled shoes and in a long, low-cut gown with a sweeping, rustling skirt.

She cooked or washed and used the soapy water to scrub the floors, or more quietly, less flushed, pressed and mended linen for the three of them. Or when the cooking, washing, and cleaning had all been got out of the way, she gave lessons to Katenka; or with her nose in her textbooks worked at her own political re-education, in order to qualify as a teacher at the new, reorganized school.

The closer this woman and her daughter became to him, the less he dared to think of them as family and the stricter was the control imposed on his thoughts by his duty to his own family and the pain of his broken faith. There was nothing offensive to Lara or Katenka in this limitation. On the contrary, this attitude on his part contained a world of deference that excluded every trace of vulgarity.

But the division in him was a sorrow and a torment, and he became accustomed to it only as one gets used to an un-healed and frequently reopened wound.

16

Two or three months went by. One day in October Yurii Andreievich said to Larisa Feodorovna:

“You know, it looks as if I’ll be forced to resign from my jobs. It’s always the same thing—it happens again and again. At first everything is splendid. ‘Come along. We welcome good, honest work, we welcome ideas, especially new ideas. What could please us better? Do your work, struggle, carry on.’

“Then you find in practice that what they mean by ideas is nothing but words—claptrap in praise of the revolution and the regime. I’m sick and tired of it. And it’s not the kind of thing I’m good at.

“I suppose they are right, from their point of view. Of course, I’m not on their side. Only I find it hard to reconcile myself to the idea that they are radiant heroes and that I am a mean wretch who sides with tyranny and obscurantism. Have you ever heard of Nikolai Vedeniapin?”

“Well, of course! Both before I met you and from what you’ve told me yourself. Sima Tuntseva often speaks of him, she’s a follower of his. To my shame, I haven’t read his books. I don’t like purely philosophical works. I think a little philosophy should be added to life and art by way of seasoning, but to make it one’s speciality seems to me as strange as eating nothing but horseradish. But I’m sorry, I’ve distracted you with my nonsense.”

“No, actually it’s very much what I think myself. Well, about my uncle, I’m supposed to be corrupted by his influence. One of my sins is a belief in intuition. And yet see how ridiculous: they all shout that I’m a marvellous diagnostician, and as a matter of fact it’s true that I don’t often make mistakes in diagnosing a disease. Well, what is this immediate grasp of a situation as a whole supposed to be if not the intuition they find so detestable?

“Another thing is that I am obsessed by the problem of mimicry, the outward adaptation of an organism to the color of its environment. I think this biological phenomenon can cast light on the problem of the relationship between the inward and the outward world.

“I dared to touch on this problem in my lectures. Immediately there was a chorus: ‘Idealism, mysticism, Goethe’s Naturphilosophie, neo-Schellingism.’

“It’s time I got out. I’ll stay on at the hospital until they throw me out, but I’ll resign from the Institute and the Health Service. I don’t want to worry you, but occasionally I have the feeling that they might arrest me any day.”

“God forbid, Yurochka. It hasn’t come to that yet, fortunately. But you are right. It won’t do any harm to be more careful. I’ve noticed that whenever this regime comes to power it goes through certain regular stages. In the first stage it’s the triumph of reason, of the spirit of criticism, the fight against prejudice and so on.

“Then comes the second stage. The accent is all on the shady activities of the pretended sympathizers, the hangers-on. There is more and more suspicion—informers, intrigues, hatreds. And you are right—we are at the beginning of the second stage..

“We don’t have to go far to find evidence of it. The local evolutionary court has had two new members transferred to it from Khodatskoie—two old political convicts from among the workers, Tiverzin and Antipov.

“They both know me perfectly well—in fact, one of them is my father-in-law. And yet it’s only since their arrival, quite recently, that I’ve begun really to tremble for Katenka’s and my life. They are capable of anything. Antipov doesn’t like me. It would be quite like them to destroy me and even Pasha one of these days in the name of higher revolutionary justice.”

The sequel to this conversation took place very soon. A search had been carried out by night at the widow Goregliadova’s, at 48 Buianovka Street, next door to the hospital. A cache of arms had been found and a counterrevolutionary organization uncovered. Many people were arrested and the wave of searches and arrests continued. It was whispered that some of the suspects had escaped across the river. “Though what good will it do them?” people said. “There are rivers and rivers. Now the Amur, for instance, at Blagoveshchensk—you jump in and swim across and you are in China! That really is a river. That’s quite a different matter.”

“The air is full of threats,” said Lara. “Our time of safety is over. They are sure to arrest us, you and me. And then what will become of Katenka? I am a mother, I can’t let this misfortune happen, I must think of something. I must have a plan. It’s driving me out of my mind.”

“Let’s try to think. Though what is there that we can do? Is it in our power to avert this blow? Isn’t it a matter of fate?”

“We certainly can’t escape, there’s nowhere to go. But we could withdraw into the shadow, into the background. Go to Varykino, for instance. I keep thinking of the house there. It’s very lonely and neglected, but we would be less in the way than here, we wouldn’t attract so much attention. Winter is coming on. I wouldn’t at all mind spending it there. By the time they got around to us we’d have gained a year of life; that’s always something. Samdeviatov would be a link between us and the town. Perhaps he’d help us to go into hiding. What do you think? It’s true, there isn’t a soul, it’s empty and desolate, at least it was when I was there in March. And they say there are wolves. It’s rather frightening. But then people, anyway people like Tiverzin and Antipov, are more frightening than wolves.”

“I don’t know what to say. Haven’t you been urging me to go to Moscow all this time, telling me not to put it off? That’s easier now. I made inquiries at the station. Apparently they’ve stopped worrying about black-marketeers. Not everyone whose papers aren’t in order gets taken off the train. They shoot less, they’ve got tired.

“It worries me that I’ve had no reply to my letters to Moscow. I ought to go there and see what’s happening to them—you keep telling me so yourself. But then how am I to take what you say about Varykino? You surely wouldn’t go to such an out-of-the-way place by yourself?”

“No, of course, without you it would be impossible.”

“And yet you tell me to go to Moscow?”

“Yes, you should go.”

“Listen. I’ll tell you what, I’ve got a wonderful idea—let’s go to Moscow, all three of us.”

“To Moscow? You’re mad! What should I do in Moscow? No, I have to stay, I must be near here. It’s here that Pasha’s fate will be decided. I must wait here and be within reach if he needs me.”

“Well then, let’s think about Katenka.”

“I was talking about her with Sima—Sima Tuntseva, she comes to see me sometimes.”

“Yes, I know, I’ve often seen her.”

“I’m surprised at you. In your place I’d have fallen in love with her at once. I don’t know where you men keep your eyes! She’s such a marvel! Pretty, graceful, intelligent, well read, kind, clear-headed.”

“Her sister gave me a haircut the day I arrived—Glafira, the seamstress.”

“I know. They both live with their oldest sister, Avdotia, the one who’s a librarian. They are a good honest working family. I thought of asking them—if it comes to the worst, if you and I are arrested—if they would look after Katenka. I haven’t made up my mind yet.”

“Only if there really isn’t any other way out. Pray God, it won’t come to that.”

“They say Sima is a bit odd—not quite right in the head. It’s true she is not quite normal, but that’s only because she’s so profound and original. She’s not an intellectual, but she’s phenomenally educated. You and she are extraordinarily alike in your views. I think I should be quite happy about Katenka if she brought her up.”

17

Once again he had been to the station and had again come back without having accomplished anything. Everything was still undecided. He and Lara were faced with the unknown. The weather was cold and dark as before the first snow. The sky, particularly where large patches of it could be seen, as at intersections, had a wintry look.

When Yurii Andreievich came home, he found that Lara had a visitor, Sima. They were having a conversation that was more like a lecture Sima was delivering to her hostess. Yurii Andreievich did not want to be in their way. He also wanted to be alone a little. The women were talking in the next room. The door between the two rooms was open; through the curtain that hung to the floor he could hear all they were saying.

“I’ll go on with my sewing but don’t take any notice of it, Sima dear. I’m listening. I attended lectures on history and philosophy. Your way of thinking interests me very much. Moreover, it’s a great relief to listen to you. We haven’t slept much the last few nights, worrying about Katenka. I know it’s my duty as her mother to see to it that she is safe if anything happens to us. I ought to think it out calmly and sensibly, but I’m not very good at that. It makes me sad to realize it. I am depressed from exhaustion and sleeplessness. It steadies me to listen to you. And then, it’s going to snow any minute. It’s lovely when it’s snowing to listen to long, intelligent talk. If you glance out of the corner of your eye at the window when it’s snowing you always feel as if someone were coming to the door across the yard, have you noticed? Go on, Sima dear. I’m listening.”

“Where did we leave off last time?”

Yurii Andreievich did not catch Lara’s reply. He listened to what Sima was saying:

“It’s possible to use words such as ‘culture,’ ‘epochs.’ But people understand them in so many different ways. Because their meaning is ambiguous, I won’t use them. I’ll replace them with other words.

“I would say that man is made up of two parts, of God and work. Each succeeding stage in the development of the human spirit is marked by the achievement over many generations of an enormously slow and lengthy work. Such a work was Egypt. Greece was another. The theology of the Old Testament prophets was a third. The last in time, not yet superseded by anything else and still being accomplished by all who are inspired, is Christianity.

“To show you the completely new thing it brought into the world in all its freshness—not as you know it and are used to it but more simply, more directly—I should like to go over a few extracts from the liturgy—only a very few, and abridged at that.

“Most liturgical texts bring together the concepts of the Old and the New Testament and put them side by side. For instance, the burning bush, the exodus from Egypt, the youths in the fiery furnace, Jonah and the whale are presented as parallels to the immaculate conception and the resurrection of Christ.

“Such comparisons bring out, very strikingly, I think, the way in which the Old Testament is old and the Gospel is new. In a number of texts Mary’s motherhood is compared to the crossing of- the Red Sea by the Jews. For instance there is one verse that begins: ‘The Red Sea is the likeness of the virgin bride,’ and goes on to say that ‘as the sea was impenetrable after its crossing by the Israelites, the Immaculate One was incorrupt after the birth of Emmanuel.’ That is to say, after the Jews crossed the Red Sea it became impassable, as before, and the Virgin after giving birth to our Lord was as immaculate as before. A parallel is drawn between the two events. What kind of events are they? Both are supernatural, both are recognized as miracles. What, then, was regarded as miraculous in each epoch—the ancient, primitive epoch and the later, post-Roman epoch which was far more advanced?

“In the first miracle you have a popular leader, the patriarch Moses, dividing the waters by a magic gesture, allowing a whole nation—countless numbers, hundreds of thousands of people—to go through, and when the last man is across the sea closes up again and submerges and drowns the pursuing Egyptians. The whole picture is in the spirit of antiquity—the elements obeying the magician, great jostling multitudes like Roman armies on the march, a people and a leader. Everything is visible, audible, overpowering.

“In the second miracle you have a girl—an everyday figure who would have gone unnoticed in the ancient world—quietly, secretly bringing forth a child, bringing forth life, bringing forth the miracle of life, the ‘universal life,’ as He was afterwards called. The birth of her child is not only a violation of human laws as interpreted by the scribes, since it was out of wedlock; it also contradicts the laws of nature. She gives birth not by virtue of a natural process but by a miracle, by an inspiration. And from now on, the basis of life is to be that inspiration which the Gospel strives to make the foundation of life, contrasting the commonplace with the unique, the weekday with the holiday, and repudiating all compulsion.

“What an enormously significant change! How did it come about that an individual human event, insignificant by ancient standards, was regarded as equal in significance to the migration of a whole people? Why should it have this value in the eyes of heaven?—For it is through the eyes of heaven that it must be judged, it is before the face of heaven and in the sacred light of its own uniqueness that it all takes place.

“Something in the world had changed. Rome was at an end. The reign of numbers was at an end. The duty, imposed by armed force, to live unanimously as a people, as a whole nation, was abolished. Leaders and nations were relegated to the past.

“They were replaced by the doctrine of individuality and freedom. Individual human life became the life story of God, and its contents filled the past expanses of the universe. As it says in a liturgy for the Feast of the Annunciation, Adam tried to be like God and failed, but now God was made man so that Adam should be made God.

“I’ll come back to this in a minute,” said Sima. “But now I’d like to digress a little. With respect to the care of the workers, the protection of the mother, the struggle against the power of money, our revolutionary era is a wonder, unforgettable era of new, permanent achievements, but as regards its interpretation of life and the philosophy of happiness that is being propagated, it’s simply impossible to believe that it is meant to be taken seriously, it’s such a comic survival of the past. If all this rhetoric about leaders and peoples had the power to reverse history, it would set us back thousands of years to the Biblical times of shepherd tribes and patriarchs. But fortunately this is impossible.

“Now a few words about Christ and Mary Magdalene—this isn’t from the Gospel but from the prayers for one of the days in Holy Week, I think it’s Tuesday or Wednesday. You know it all, Larisa Feodorovna, without me; I only want to remind you of something, I am not trying to teach you.

“As you know, the word ‘passion’ in Slavonic means in the first place suffering, the passion of Christ—‘Christ entering upon His passion.’ The liturgy also uses it in its later Russian connotation of ‘lust’ and ‘vice,’ ‘My soul is enslaved by passions, I have become like the beasts of the field,’ ‘Being cast out of paradise, let us become worthy to be readmitted to it by mastering our passions,’ and so on. It may be wrong of me, but I don’t like the Lenten texts on the curbing of the senses and the mortification of the flesh. They are curiously flat and clumsy and without the poetry of other spiritual writings. I always think they were composed by fat monks. Not that I care if they themselves broke the rules and deceived other people or if they lived according to their conscience—it’s not they that I’m concerned with, but with the actual content of these passages. All these acts of contrition give too much importance to various infirmities of the flesh and to whether it is fat or famished—it’s repulsive. It seems to me to raise something dirty, unimportant, inconsequential, to a dignity that does not belong to it. Forgive me for all these digressions.

“I have always wondered why Mary Magdalene is mentioned on the very eve of Easter, just before the death and resurrection of Christ. I don’t know the reason for it, but this reminder of what life is seems so timely at the moment of His taking leave of it and shortly before he rises again. Now listen to how the reminder is made—what genuine passion there is in it and what an uncompromising directness.

“There is some doubt as to whether this does refer to the Magdalene or to one of the other Marys, but anyway, she begs our Lord:

“ ‘Unbind my debt as I unbind my hair.’ It means: ‘As I loosen my hair, do Thou release me from my guilt.’ Could any expression of repentance, of the thirst to be forgiven, be more concrete, more tangible?

“And later on in the liturgy for the same day there is another, more detailed passage, and this time it almost certainly refers to Mary Magdalene.

“Again she repents in a terribly tangible way over her past, saying that every night her flesh burns because of her old, inveterate habits. ‘For the night is to me the flaring up of lust, the dark, moonless zeal of sin.’ She begs Christ to accept her tears of repentance and be moved by the sincerity of her sighs, so that she may dry His most pure feet with her hair—reminding Him that in the rushing waves of her hair Eve took refuge when she was overcome with fear and shame in paradise. ‘Let me kiss Thy most pure feet and water them with my tears and dry them with the hair of my head, which covered Eve and sheltered her in its rushing waves when she was afraid in the cool of the day in paradise.’ And immediately after all this about her hair, she exclaims: ‘Who can fathom the multitude of my sins or the depths of Thy mercy?’ What familiarity, what equality between God and life, God and the individual, God and a woman!”

18

Yurii Andreievich had come home from the station tired. It was his day off, and usually he slept enough that day to last him the nine others of the ten-day week. He sat sprawling on the sofa, occasionally half reclining or stretching full length. But although he listened to Sima through a mist of oncoming drowsiness, her reflections delighted him. “Of course, she’s taken it all from Uncle Nikolai,” he thought. “But how intelligent she is, how talented.”

He got up and went to the window. It looked out on the yard, like the window of the room next door from which only unintelligible whispers could now be heard.

The weather was getting worse, and it was growing dark in the yard. Two magpies flew in from the street and fluttered around looking for a place to settle, their feathers ruffled by the wind. They perched on the lid of the trash bin, flew up onto the fence, flew down to the ground, and walked about the yard.

“Magpies mean snow,” thought the doctor. At the same moment Sima said aloud in the other room:

“Magpies mean news. You’ll have guests, or else a letter.”

A little later someone pulled the handle of the doorbell, which Yurii Andreievich had mended a few days earlier. Lara came out from behind the curtain and walked swiftly through to the hall to open the door. Yurii Andreievich heard her talking with Sima’s sister Glafira.

“You’ve come for your sister? Yes, she’s here.”

“No, I didn’t come for her, though we might as well go home together if she is ready. I’ve brought a letter for your friend. It’s lucky for him that I once had a job at the post office. I don’t know how many hands it’s been through, it’s from Moscow and it’s been five months on the way. They couldn’t find the addressee. At last they thought of asking me and I knew, of course—he once came to me for a haircut.”

The long letter, written on many sheets of paper, crumpled and soiled in its tattered envelope, which had been opened at the post office, was from Tonia. The doctor found it in his hands without knowing how it had got there; he had not noticed Lara handing it to him. When he began reading it he was still conscious of being in Yuriatin, in Lara’s house, but gradually, as he read on, he lost all realization of it. Sima came out, greeted him, and said goodbye; he said the right things automatically but paid no attention to her and never noticed when she left the house. Gradually he forgot more and more completely where he was or what surrounded him.

“Yura,” Antonina Alexandrovna wrote, “do you know that we have a daughter? We have christened her Masha in memory of your mother, Maria Nikolaievna.

“Now something entirely different. Several prominent people, professors who belonged to the Cadet Party and Right-wing Socialists, Miliukov, Kizevetter, Kuskov, and several others including your Uncle Nikolai, my father, and the rest of us, are being deported abroad.

“This is a misfortune, especially in your absence, but we must accept it and thank God that our exile takes so mild a form when at this terrible time things could have been so much worse for us. If you were here, you would come with us. But where are you? I am sending this letter to Antipova’s address, she’ll give it to you if she finds you. I am tortured by not knowing if the exit permit we are getting as a family will be extended to you later on, when, if God is willing, you are found. I have not given up believing that you are alive and that you will be found. My loving heart tells me that this is so, and I trust it. Perhaps by then, by the time you reappear, conditions in Russia will be milder and you will manage to get a separate visa for yourself and we shall all be together once again in the same place. But as I write this, I don’t believe in the possibility of such happiness.

“The whole trouble is that I love you and that you don’t love me. I keep trying to discover the meaning of this judgment on me, to interpret it, to justify it. I look into myself, I go over our whole life together and everything I know about myself, and I can’t find the beginning, and I can’t remember what it is I did or how I brought this misfortune on myself. I have a feeling that you misjudge me, that you take an unkind view of me, that you see me as in a distorting mirror.

“As for me, I love you. If only you knew how much I love you! I love all that is unusual in you, the good with the bad, and all the ordinary traits of your character, whose extraordinary combination is so dear to me, your face ennobled by your thoughts, which otherwise might not seem handsome, your great gifts and intelligence which, as it were, have taken the place of the will that is lacking. All this is dear to me, and I know no man who is better than you.

“But listen, do you know what? Even if you were not so dear to me, even if I did not like you so much, even then the distressing truth of my coldness would not have been disclosed to me, even then I would have believed that I love you. Out of sheer terror before the humiliating, destructive punishment which failure to love is, I would unconsciously have shunned the realization that I do not love you. Neither I nor you would ever have learned it. My own heart would have concealed it from me, for failure to love is almost like murder and I would have been incapable of inflicting such a blow on anyone.

“Nothing is definitely settled yet, but we are probably going to Paris. I’ll be in those distant lands where you were taken as a child and where Father and my uncle were brought up. Father sends you his greetings. Sasha has grown a lot, he is not particularly good-looking but he is a big, strong boy and whenever we speak of you he cries bitterly and won’t be comforted. I can’t go on. I can’t stop crying. Well, goodbye. Let me make the sign of the cross over you and bless you for all the years ahead, for the endless parting, the trials, the uncertainties, for all your long, long, dark way. I am not blaming you for anything, I am not reproaching you, do as you please with your life, I’ll be happy if all is well with you.

“Before we left the Urals—what a terrible and fateful place it turned out to be for us—I got to know Larisa Feodorovna fairly well. I am thankful to her for being constantly at my side at a difficult time and for helping me through my confinement. I must honestly admit that she is a good person, but I don’t want to be a hypocrite—she is my exact opposite. I was born to make life simple and to look for sensible solutions; she, to complicate it and create confusion.

“Farewell, I must stop. They have come for the letter, and it’s time I packed. Oh, Yura, Yura, my dear, my darling, my husband, the father of my children, what is happening to us? Do you realize that we’ll never, never see each other again? Now I’ve written it down, do you realize what it means? Do you understand, do you understand? They are hurrying me and it’s as if they had come to take me to my death. Yura! Yura!”

Yurii Andreievich looked up from the letter with absent, tearless eyes, dry with grief, ravaged by suffering. He could see nothing around him, he was not conscious of anything.

Outside it was snowing. The wind swept the snow aside, ever faster and thicker, as if it were trying to catch up with something, and Yurii Andreievich stared ahead of him out of the window, as if he were not looking at the snow but were still reading Tonia’s letter and as if what flickered past him were not small dry snow crystals but the spaces between the small black letters, white, white, endless, endless.

Involuntarily he groaned and clutched his breast. He felt he was going to faint, hobbled the few steps to the sofa, and fell down on it unconscious.