Doctor Zhivago

Part Two

A GIRL FROM A DIFFERENT CIRCLE

1

The war with Japan was not over yet. It was unexpectedly overshadowed by other events. Waves of revolution rolled across Russia, each one higher and more prodigious than the last.¹

At that time Amalia Karlovna Guichard, the widow of a Belgian engineer and herself a Russified Frenchwoman, came to Moscow from the Urals with two children, her son Rodion and her daughter Larissa. Her son she sent to the Cadet Corps, and her daughter to a girls’ high school, by chance the same one and in the same class in which Nadya Kologrivova was studying.

Mme Guichard’s husband had left her some savings in securities, which had been rising but now had begun to fall. To slow the melting away of her means and not sit with folded arms, Mme Guichard bought a small business, Levitskaya’s dressmaking shop near the Triumphal Arch, from the seamstress’s heirs, with the right to keep the old firm intact, with the circle of its former clients and all its modistes and apprentices.

Mme Guichard did this on the advice of the lawyer Komarovsky, her husband’s friend and her own mainstay, a cold-blooded businessman, who knew business life in Russia like the back of his hand. She corresponded with him about her move, he met them at the station, he took them across the whole of Moscow to the furnished rooms of the Montenegro in Oruzheiny Lane, where he had taken quarters for them, he insisted on sending Rodion to the corps and Lara to the high school he recommended, and he joked distractedly with the boy and fixed his gaze on the girl so that she blushed.

2

Before moving to the small three-room apartment that came with the shop, they lived for about a month at the Montenegro.

These were the most terrible parts of Moscow, slick cabbies and low haunts, whole streets given over to depravity, slums full of “lost creatures.”

The children were not surprised at the dirtiness of the rooms, the bedbugs, the squalor of the furnishings. After their father’s death, their mother had lived in eternal fear of destitution. Rodya and Lara were used to hearing that they were on the verge of ruin. They understood that they were not street children, but in them there was a deep-seated timidity before the rich, as in children from an orphanage.

A living example of this fear was given them by their mother. Amalia Karlovna was a plump blonde of about thirty-five, whose fits of heart failure alternated with fits of stupidity. She was a terrible coward and had a mortal fear of men. Precisely for that reason, being frightened and bewildered, she kept falling from one embrace into another.

In the Montenegro they occupied number 23, and in number 24, from the day the place was founded, the cellist Tyshkevich had been living, a kindly fellow, sweaty and bald, in a little wig, who folded his hands prayerfully and pressed them to his breast when he was persuading someone, and threw back his head and rolled up his eyes inspiredly when he played in society or appeared at concerts. He was rarely at home and went off for whole days to the Bolshoi Theater or the Conservatory. The neighbors became acquainted. Mutual favors brought them close.

Since the children’s presence occasionally hampered Amalia Karlovna during Komarovsky’s visits, Tyshkevich began leaving his key with her when he left, so that she could receive her friend. Soon Mme Guichard became so accustomed to his self-sacrifices that she knocked on his door several times in tears, asking him to defend her against her protector.

3

The house was of one story, not far from the corner of Tverskaya. The proximity of the Brest railway could be felt. Its realm began nearby, the company apartments of the employees, the engine depots and warehouses.

The place was home to Olya Demina, an intelligent girl, the niece of one of the employees of the Moscow Freight Yard.

She was a capable apprentice. The former owner had taken notice of her, and now the new one began to bring her closer. Olya Demina liked Lara very much.

Everything remained as it had been under Levitskaya. The sewing machines turned like mad under the pumping feet or fluttering hands of the weary seamstresses. One would be quietly sewing, sitting on a table and drawing her hand with the needle and long thread far out. The floor was littered with scraps. They had to talk loudly to outshout the rapping of the sewing machines and the modulated trills of Kirill Modestovich, a canary in a cage under the window’s arch, the secret of whose name the former owner had taken with her to the grave.

In the waiting room, ladies in a picturesque group surrounded a table with magazines. They stood, sat, or half reclined in the poses they saw in the pictures and, studying the models, discussed styles. At another table, in the director’s place, sat Amalia Karlovna’s assistant from among the senior cutters, Faïna Silantievna Fetisova, a bony woman with warts in the hollows of her wizened cheeks.

She held a bone cigarette holder with a cigarette in it between her yellowed teeth, squinted her eye with its yellow white, and let out a yellow stream of smoke from her nose and mouth as she wrote down measurements, receipt numbers, addresses, and the preferences of the crowding customers.

Amalia Karlovna was a new and inexperienced person in the shop. She did not feel herself the owner in the full sense. But the personnel were honest; Fetisova could be relied on. Nevertheless, it was a troubled time. Amalia Karlovna was afraid to think of the future. She would be seized by despair. Everything would drop from her hands.

Komarovsky visited them often. When Viktor Ippolitovich crossed the whole shop on his way to their apartment and in passing frightened the fancy ladies changing clothes, who hid behind the screen at his appearance and from there playfully parried his casual jokes, the seamstresses disapprovingly and mockingly whispered after him: “His Honor,” “Her’n,” “Amalka’s Heartthrob,” “Stud,” “Skirt-chaser.”

An object of still greater hatred was his bulldog Jack, whom he sometimes brought on a leash and who pulled him along with such violent tugs that Komarovsky would miss his step, lurch forward, and go after the dog with his arms stretched out, like a blind man following his guide.

Once in the spring Jack snapped at Lara’s leg and tore her stocking.

“I’ll do him in, the filthy devil,” Olya Demina whispered in Lara’s ear in a child’s hoarse voice.

“Yes, he’s really a disgusting dog. But how will you do it, silly girl?”

“Shh, don’t shout, I’ll tell you. You know those Easter eggs, the stone ones. Like your mother has on the chest of drawers …”

“Yes, of course, made of marble, of crystal.”

“Right! Bend down, I’ll whisper in your ear. You take one, dip it in lard, the lard sticks to it, the mangy mutt swallows it, stuffs his gut, the little Satan, and—basta! Paws up! It’s glass!”

Lara laughed and thought with envy: The girl lives in poverty, works hard. Young ones from the people develop early. But see how much there still is in her that is unspoiled, childlike. The eggs, Jack—where did she get it all? “Why is it my lot,” thought Lara, “to see everything and take it so to heart?”

4

“But for him mama is—what’s it called … He’s mama’s … whatever … They’re bad words, I don’t want to repeat them. But why in that case does he look at me with such eyes? I’m her daughter.”

She was a little over sixteen, but she was a fully formed young girl. They gave her eighteen or more. She had a clear mind and an easy character. She was very good-looking.

She and Rodya understood that they would have to get everything in life the hard way. In contrast to the idle and secure, they had no time to indulge in premature finagling and sniff out in theory things that in practice had not yet touched them. Only the superfluous is dirty. Lara was the purest being in the world.

The brother and sister knew the price of everything and valued what they had attained. One had to be in good repute to make one’s way. Lara studied well, not out of an abstract thirst for knowledge, but because to be exempt from paying for one’s studies one had to be a good student, and therefore one had to study well. Just as she studied well, so without effort she washed dishes, helped in the shop, and ran errands for her mother. She moved noiselessly and smoothly, and everything about her—the inconspicuous quickness of her movements, her height, her voice, her gray eyes and fair hair—went perfectly together.

It was Sunday, the middle of July. On holidays you could lounge in bed a little longer in the morning. Lara lay on her back, her arms thrown back, her hands under her head.

In the shop there was an unaccustomed quiet. The window onto the street was open. Lara heard a droshky rumbling in the distance drive off the cobbled pavement into the grooves of the horse-tram rails, and the crude clatter turned to a smooth gliding of wheels as if on butter. “I must sleep a little more,” thought Lara. The murmur of the city was as soporific as a lullaby.

Lara sensed her length and position in the bed by two points now—the jut of her left shoulder and the big toe of her right foot. There was a shoulder and a foot, and all the rest was more or less herself, her soul or essence, harmoniously enclosed in its outlines and responsively straining towards the future.

I must fall asleep, thought Lara, and she called up in her imagination the sunny side of Karetny Row at that hour, the sheds of the equipage establishments with enormous carriages for sale on clean-swept floors, the beveled glass of carriage lanterns, the stuffed bears, the rich life. And slightly lower—Lara was picturing it mentally—the dragoons drilling in the courtyard of the Znamensky barracks, horses decorously prancing in circles, running leaps into the saddle, riding at a walk, riding at a trot, riding at a gallop. And the gaping mouths of nannies with children and wet nurses, pressed in a row up against the barrack fence. And still lower—thought Lara—Petrovka Street, the Petrovsky Lines.

“How can you, Lara! Where do you get such ideas? I simply want to show you my apartment. The more so as it’s close by.”

It was the name day of Olga, the little daughter of his acquaintances on Karetny Row. The grown-ups were having a party for the occasion—dancing, champagne. He invited mama, but mama could not go, she was indisposed. Mama said: “Take Lara. You’re always cautioning me: ‘Amalia, see to Lara.’ So go now and see to her.” And he saw to her all right! Ha, ha, ha!

What a mad thing, the waltz! You whirl and whirl, without a thought in your head. While the music is playing, a whole eternity goes by, like life in novels. But the moment it stops, there is a feeling of scandal, as if they had poured cold water over you or found you undressed. Besides, you allow others these liberties out of vanity, to show what a big girl you are.

She could never have supposed that he danced so well. What knowing hands he has, how confidently he takes her by the waist! But never again would she allow anyone to kiss her like that. She could never have supposed that so much shamelessness could be concentrated in anyone’s lips when they were pressed so long to your own.

Drop all this foolishness. Once and for all. Do not play the simpleton, do not be coy, do not lower your eyes bashfully. It will end badly someday. The dreadful line is very close here. One step, and you fall straight into the abyss. Forget thinking about dances. That is where the whole evil lies. Do not be embarrassed to refuse. Pretend that you never learned to dance or have broken your leg.

5

In the fall there were disturbances at the Moscow railway junction. The Moscow–Kazan railway went on strike. The Moscow–Brest line was to join it. The decision to strike had been taken, but the railway committee could not agree on the day to call it. Everyone on the railway knew about the strike, and it needed only an external pretext for it to start spontaneously.

It was a cold, gray morning at the beginning of October. The wages on the line were to be paid that day. For a long time no information came from the accounting department. Then a boy arrived at the office with a schedule, a record of payments, and an armload of workers’ pay books collected in order to impose penalties. The payments began. Down the endless strip of unbuilt space that separated the station, the workshops, the engine depots, the warehouses, and the tracks from the wooden office buildings, stretched a line of conductors, switchmen, metalworkers and their assistants, scrubwomen from the car park, waiting to receive their wages.

It smelled of early city winter, trampled maple leaves, melting snow, engine fumes, and warm rye bread, which was baked in the basement of the station buffet and had just been taken out of the oven. Trains arrived and departed. They were made up and dismantled with a waving of furled and unfurled flags. The watchmen’s little horns, the pocket whistles of the couplers, and the bass-voiced hooting of locomotives played out all sorts of tunes. Pillars of smoke rose into the sky in endless ladders. The heated-up locomotives stood ready to go, scorching the cold winter clouds with boiling clouds of steam.

Up and down the tracks paced the head of the section, the railway expert Fuflygin, and the foreman of the station area, Pavel Ferapontovich Antipov. Antipov had been pestering the repair service with complaints about the materials supplied to him for replacing the tracks. The steel was not tensile enough. The rails did not hold up under tests for bending and breaking, and, according to Antipov’s conjectures, were sure to crack in freezing weather. The management treated Pavel Ferapontovich’s complaints with indifference. Somebody involved was lining his pockets.

Fuflygin was wearing an expensive fur coat, unbuttoned, trimmed with railway piping, and under it a new civilian suit made of cheviot. He stepped carefully along the embankment, admiring the general line of his lapels, the straight crease of his trousers, and the noble shape of his shoes.

Antipov’s words went in one ear and out the other. Fuflygin was thinking his own thoughts, kept taking his watch out and looking at it, and was hurrying somewhere.

“Right, right, old boy,” he interrupted Antipov impatiently, “but that’s only on the main lines somewhere or on a through passage with a lot of traffic. But, mind you, what have you got here? Sidings and dead ends, burdock and nettles, at most the sorting of empty freight cars and the shunting maneuvers of ‘pufferbillies.’ And he’s still displeased! You’re out of your mind! Not just these rails; here you could even lay wooden ones.”

Fuflygin looked at his watch, snapped the lid shut, and began gazing into the distance, where the highway came close to the railway. A carriage appeared at the bend of the road. This was Fuflygin’s own rig. Madame his wife had come for him. The driver stopped the horses almost on the tracks, holding them back all the time and whoa-ing at them in a high, womanish voice, like a nanny at whimpering children—the horses were afraid of trains. In the corner of the carriage, carelessly reclining on the cushions, sat a beautiful lady.

“Well, brother, some other time,” said the head of the section, and he waved his hand as if to say “Enough of your rails. There are more important matters.”

The spouses went rolling off.

6

Three or four hours later, closer to dusk, two figures, who had not been on the surface earlier, emerged as if from under the ground in the field to one side of the tracks and, looking back frequently, began to hurry off. They were Antipov and Tiverzin.

“Let’s make it quick,” said Tiverzin. “I’m not afraid of being tailed by spies, but once this diddling around is over, they’ll climb out of the dugout and catch up with us, and I can’t stand the sight of them. If everything’s dragged out like this, there’s no point fussing and fuming. There’s no need for a committee, and for playing with fire, and burrowing under the ground! You’re a good one, too, supporting all this slop from the Nikolaevsky line.”

“My Darya’s got typhoid fever. I’d like to get her to the hospital. Until I do, my head’s not good for anything.”

“They say they’re handing out wages today. I’ll go to the office. If it wasn’t payday, as God is my witness, I’d spit on you all and personally put an end to all this dithering without a moment’s delay.”

“In what way, may I ask?”

“Nothing to it. Go down to the boiler room, give a whistle, and the party’s over.”

They said good-bye and went off in different directions.

Tiverzin went along the tracks towards the city. On his way he met people coming from the office with their pay. There were a great many of them. Tiverzin judged by the look of it that almost everyone on station territory had been paid.

It was getting dark. Idle workers crowded on the open square near the office, lit by the office lights. At the entrance to the square stood Fuflygin’s carriage. Fuflygina sat in it in the same pose, as if she had not left the carriage since morning. She was waiting for her husband, who was getting his money in the office.

Wet snow and rain unexpectedly began to fall. The driver climbed down from the box and began to raise the leather top. While he rested his foot on the back and stretched the tight braces, Fuflygina admired the mess of watery silver beads flitting past the light of the office lamps. She cast her unblinking, dreamy gaze over the crowding workers with such an air, as though in case of need this gaze could pass unhindered through them, as through fog or drizzle.

Tiverzin happened to catch that expression. He cringed. He walked past without greeting Fuflygina, and decided to draw his salary later, so as to avoid running into her husband in the office. He walked on into the less well lit side of the workshops, where the turntable showed black with its tracks radiating towards the engine depot.

“Tiverzin! Kuprik!” several voices called to him from the darkness. In front of the workshops stood a bunch of people. Inside there was shouting and a child’s weeping could be heard. “Kiprian Savelyevich, step in for the boy,” said some woman in the crowd.

The old master Pyotr Khudoleev was again giving a habitual hiding to his victim, the young apprentice Yusupka.

Khudoleev had not always been a torturer of apprentices, a drunkard and a heavy-fisted brawler. Time was when merchants’ and priests’ daughters from the industrial suburbs near Moscow cast long glances at the dashing workman. But Tiverzin’s mother, to whom he proposed just after she graduated from the diocesan girls’ school, refused him and married his comrade, the locomotive engineer Savely Nikitich Tiverzin.

In the sixth year of her widowhood, after the terrible death of Savely Nikitich (he was burned up in 1888 in one of the sensational train collisions of that time), Pyotr Petrovich renewed his suit, and again Marfa Gavrilovna refused him. After that Khudoleev started drinking and became violent, settling accounts with the whole world, which was to blame, as he was convinced, for his present misfortunes.

Yusupka was the son of the yard porter Gimazetdin from the Tiverzins’ courtyard. Tiverzin protected the boy in the workshops. This added heat to Khudoleev’s dislike of him.

“Look how you’re holding your file, you slope-head,” Khudoleev shouted, pulling Yusupka’s hair and beating him on the neck. “Is that any way to file down a casting? I’m asking you, are you going to foul up the work for me, you Kasimov bride,² allah-mullah, slant-eyes?”

“Ow, I won’t, mister, ow, ow, I won’t, I won’t, ow, that hurts!”

“A thousand times he’s been told, first bring the mandril under, then tighten the stop, but no, he’s got his own way. Nearly broke the spendler on me, the son of a bitch.”

“I didn’t touch the spindle, mister, by God, I didn’t.”

“Why do you tyrannize the boy?” asked Tiverzin, squeezing through the crowd.

“Don’t poke your nose in other people’s business,” Khudoleev snapped.

“I’m asking you, why do you tyrannize the boy?”

“And I’m telling you to shove the hell off, social commander. Killing’s too good for him, the scum, he nearly broke the spendler on me. He can go on his knees to me for getting off alive, the slant-eyed devil—I just boxed his ears and pulled his hair a little.”

“So according to you, Uncle Khudolei, he should have his head torn off for it? You really ought to be ashamed. An old master, gray in your hair, but no brains in your head.”

“Shove off, shove off, I said, while you’re still in one piece. I’ll knock your soul through your shoes for teaching me, you dog’s ass! You got made on the ties, fish-blood, right under your father’s nose. I know your mother, the wet-tail, all too well, the mangy cat, the skirt-dragger!”

What came next took no more than a minute. They each grabbed the first thing that came to hand among the heavy tools and pieces of iron that lay about on the machines, and they would have killed each other if at that same moment people had not rushed in a mob to pull them apart. Khudoleev and Tiverzin stood, their heads lowered, their foreheads almost touching, pale, with bloodshot eyes. They were unable to speak from agitation. Their arms were seized and held tightly from behind. At moments, gathering their strength, they would try to tear free, their whole bodies writhing and dragging the comrades who were hanging on to them. Hooks and buttons were torn from their clothes, their jackets and shirts were pulled from their bared shoulders. The disorderly uproar around them would not quiet down.

“The chisel! Take the chisel from him—he’ll split his skull.” “Easy, easy, Uncle Pyotr, we’ll sprain your arm.” “Are we just going to keep dancing around them? Pull them apart, lock them up, and be done with it.”

Suddenly, with a superhuman effort, Tiverzin shook off the tangle of bodies holding him and, breaking free of them, found himself running for the door. They were about to rush after him, but, seeing that he had something else in mind, let him go. He went out, slamming the door, and marched off without looking back. He was surrounded by autumnal dampness, night, darkness. “You reach them a hand and they bite it off,” he muttered, having no idea where he was going or why.

This world of baseness and falsity, where a well-fed little lady dares to look like that at witless working people, and the drunken victim of this order finds pleasure in jeering at one of his own kind, this world was now more hateful to him than ever. He walked quickly, as if the speed of his pace could bring closer the time when everything in the world would be as reasonable and harmonious as it now was in his feverish head. He knew that their strivings in recent days, the disorders on the line, the speeches at meetings, and their decision to go on strike—not yet brought to fulfillment, but also not renounced—were all separate parts of that great path which still lay before them.

But now his excitement had reached such a degree that he was impatient to run the whole of that distance at once, without stopping for breath. He did not realize where he was going with such long strides, but his feet knew very well where they were taking him.

Tiverzin did not suspect for a long time that, after he and Antipov left the dugout, the committee had decided to start the strike that same evening. The members of the committee at once assigned who among them was to go where and who would relieve whom. When the hoarse, gradually clearing and steadying signal burst from the engine repair shop, as if from the bottom of Tiverzin’s soul, a crowd from the depot and the freight yard was already moving towards the city from the semaphore at the entrance, merging with a new crowd which, at Tiverzin’s whistle, had dropped their work in the boiler room.

For many years Tiverzin thought that he alone had stopped all work and movement on the railway that night. Only later trials, in which he was judged collectively and the accusations did not include inciting to strike, led him out of that error.

People came running out, asking: “Why is the whistle blowing?” The response came from the darkness: “Are you deaf? Can’t you hear? It’s the alarm. There’s a fire.” “But where is it?” “Must be somewhere, since the whistle’s blowing.”

Doors banged, new people came out. Other voices were heard. “Go on—a fire! Country hicks! Don’t listen to the fool. It’s what’s called a walkout, understand? Here’s my hat and here’s the door, I’m not your servant anymore. Let’s go home, boys.”

More and more people joined in. The railway was on strike.

7

Tiverzin came home two days later, chilled, sleepy, and unshaven. The night before there had been a sudden cold snap, unprecedented for that time of year, and Tiverzin was dressed for fall. At the gate he was met by the yard porter Gimazetdin.

“Thank you, Mr. Tiverzin,” he began. “You not let Yusup be hurt, you make us all pray God forever.”

“Are you out of your mind, Gimazetdin? What kind of ‘mister’ am I to you? Drop all that, please. Speak quickly, you see how freezing it is.”

“Why freezing, you warm, Savelyich. Yesterday we bring your mother, Marfa Gavrilovna, full shed of firewood from freight yard, birch only, good firewood, dry firewood.”

“Thank you, Gimazetdin. There’s something else you wanted to tell me. Be quick, please, you can see I’m cold.”

“I wanted to tell you, no sleep home, Savelyich, must hide. Policeman asked, police chief asked, who come to see you. I say no one come. An assistant come, the engine team comes, railway people. But strangers—no, no!”

The house where the bachelor Tiverzin lived with his mother and his married younger brother belonged to the neighboring church of the Holy Trinity. This house was inhabited partly by certain of the clergy, by two associations of fruit- and meat-sellers who hawked their wares from stands in town, but mostly by minor employees of the Moscow–Brest railway.

The house was of stone with wooden galleries. They surrounded on four sides a dirty, unpaved courtyard. Dirty and slippery wooden stairways led up to the galleries. They smelled of cats and pickled cabbage. To the landings clung outhouses and closets with padlocks.

Tiverzin’s brother had been called up as a private in the war and had been wounded at Wafangkou.³ He was recovering in the Krasnoyarsk hospital, where his wife and two daughters had gone to visit him and receive him when he was dismissed. Hereditary railwaymen, the Tiverzins were light-footed and went all over Russia on free company passes. At the time, the apartment was quiet and empty. Only the mother and son were living in it.

The apartment was on the second floor. On the gallery outside the front door stood a barrel, which was filled by a water carrier. When Kiprian Savelyevich got up to his level, he discovered that the lid of the barrel had been moved aside and a metal mug stood frozen to the crust of ice that had formed on the water.

“Prov and nobody else,” thought Tiverzin with a smirk. “Can’t drink enough, got a hole in him, guts on fire.”

Prov Afanasyevich Sokolov, a psalm-reader, a stately and not yet old man, was a distant relation of Marfa Gavrilovna.

Kiprian Savelyevich tore the mug from the ice crust, put the lid on the barrel, and pulled the handle of the doorbell. A cloud of domestic smell and savory steam moved to meet him.

“You’ve really heated it up, mama. It’s warm here, very nice.”

His mother fell on his neck, embraced him, and wept. He stroked her head, waited a little, and moved her away gently.

“A stout heart takes cities, mama,” he said softly. “My path goes from Moscow right to Warsaw.”

“I know. That’s why I’m crying. It’s going to be bad for you. Take yourself off somewhere, Kuprinka, somewhere far away.”

“Your dear little friend, your kindly shepherd boy,⁴ Pyotr Petrovich, almost split my skull.” He meant to make her laugh. She did not understand the joke and earnestly replied:

“It’s a sin to laugh at him, Kuprinka. You should pity him. A hopeless wretch, a lost soul.”

“They’ve taken Pashka Antipov. Pavel Ferapontovich. They came at night, made a search, raked everything over. Led him away in the morning. Worse still, his Darya’s in the hospital with typhoid. Little Pavlushka—he’s in a progressive high school—is alone at home with his deaf aunt. What’s more, they’re being chased out of the apartment. I think we’ll have to take the boy in. Why did Prov come?”

“How do you know he did?”

“I saw the barrel uncovered and the mug standing on it. It must have been bottomless Prov, I thought, guzzling water.”

“You’re so sharp, Kuprinka. That’s right, it was Prov, Prov Afanasyevich. He ran by to ask if he could borrow some firewood. I gave it to him. But what a fool I am—firewood! He brought such news and it went clean out of my head. You see, the sovereign has signed a manifesto so that everything will be turned a new way, nobody’s offended, the muzhiks get the land, and everybody’s equal to the nobility.⁵ The ukase has been signed, just think of it, it only has to be made public. A new petition came from the Synod to put it into the litany or some sort of prayer of thanksgiving, I’m afraid to get it wrong. Provushka told me, and I went and forgot.”

8

Patulya Antipov, the son of the arrested Pavel Ferapontovich and the hospitalized Darya Filimonovna, came to live with the Tiverzins. He was a neat boy with regular features and dark blond hair parted in the middle. He kept smoothing it with a brush and kept straightening his jacket and his belt with its school buckle. Patulya could laugh to the point of tears and was very observant. He imitated everything he saw and heard with great likeness and comicality.

Soon after the manifesto of October 17, there was a big demonstration from the Tver to the Kaluga gate. This was an initiative in the spirit of “too many cooks spoil the broth.” Several of the revolutionary organizations that took part in the enterprise squabbled with each other and gave it up one by one, but when they learned that on the appointed morning people took to the streets even so, they hastened to send their representatives to the demonstration.

Despite Kiprian Savelyevich’s protests and dissuasions, Marfa Gavrilovna went to the demonstration with the cheerful and sociable Patulya.

It was a dry, frosty day in early November, with a still, leaden sky and a few snowflakes, so few that you could almost count them, swirling slowly and hesitantly before they fell to earth and then, in a fluffy gray dust, filled the potholes in the road.

Down the street the people came pouring, a veritable babel, faces, faces, faces, quilted winter coats and lambskin hats, old men, girl students and children, railwaymen in uniform, workers from the tram depot and the telephone station in boots above their knees and leather jackets, high school and university students.

For some time they sang the “Varshavianka,” “You Fell Victims,” and the “Marseillaise,” but suddenly the man who had been walking backwards ahead of the marchers and conducting the singing by waving a papakha⁶ clutched in his hand, stopped directing, put his hat on, and, turning his back to the procession, began to listen to what the rest of the leaders marching beside him were saying. The singing faltered and broke off. You could hear the crunching steps of the numberless crowd over the frozen pavement.

Some well-wishers informed the initiators of the march that there were Cossacks lying in wait for the demonstrators further ahead. There had been a phone call to a nearby pharmacy about the prepared ambush.

“So what?” the organizers said. “The main thing then is to keep cool and not lose our heads. We must immediately occupy the first public building that comes our way, announce the impending danger to people, and disperse one by one.”

They argued over which would be the best place to go. Some suggested the Society of Merchant’s Clerks, others the Technical Institute, still others the School of Foreign Correspondents.

During the argument, the corner of a government building appeared ahead of them. It also housed an educational institution, which as a suitable shelter was no whit worse than the ones enumerated.

When the walkers drew level with it, the leaders went up onto the semicircular landing in front of it and made signs for the head of the procession to stop. The many-leafed doors of the entrance opened, and all the marchers, coat after coat and hat after hat, began pouring into the vestibule of the school and climbing its main stairway.

“To the auditorium, to the auditorium!” solitary voices shouted behind them, but the crowd continued to flow further on, dispersing through the separate corridors and classrooms.

When they managed to bring the public back and they were all seated on chairs, the leaders tried several times to announce to the assembly that a trap had been set for them ahead, but no one listened to them. This stopping and going into the building was taken as an invitation to an improvised meeting, which began at once.

After all the marching and singing, people wanted to sit silently for a while and have someone else do the work and strain his throat for them. Compared to the chief pleasure of resting, the insignificant disagreements among the speakers, who were at one with each other in almost everything, seemed a matter of indifference.

Therefore the greatest success fell to the worst orator, who did not weary his listeners with the necessity of following him. His every word was accompanied by a roar of sympathy. No one regretted that his speech was drowned out by the noise of approval. They hastened to agree with him out of impatience, cried “Shame,” composed a telegram of protest, then suddenly, bored by the monotony of his voice, they all rose to a man and, forgetting all about the orator, hat after hat, row after row, thronged down the stairs and poured outside. The march continued.

While they were meeting, it had begun to snow. The pavement turned white. The snow fell more and more heavily.

When the dragoons came flying at them, those in the back rows did not suspect it at first. Suddenly a swelling roar rolled over them from the front, as when a crowd cries “Hurrah!” Cries of “Help!” and “Murder!” and many others merged into something indistinguishable. At almost the same moment, on the wave of those sounds, down a narrow pass formed in the shying crowd, horses’ manes and muzzles and saber-brandishing riders raced swiftly and noiselessly.

Half a platoon galloped by, turned around, re-formed, and cut from behind into the tail of the march. The massacre began.

A few minutes later the street was almost empty. People fled into the side streets. The snow fell more lightly. The evening was dry as a charcoal drawing. Suddenly the sun, setting somewhere behind the houses, began poking its finger from around the corner at everything red in the street: the red-topped hats of the dragoons, the red cloth of the fallen flag, the traces of blood scattered over the snow in red threads and spots.

Along the edge of the pavement, dragging himself with his hands, crawled a moaning man with a split skull. A row of several horsemen rode up at a walk. They were coming back from the end of the street, where they had been drawn by the pursuit. Almost under their feet, Marfa Gavrilovna was rushing about, her kerchief shoved back on her neck, and in a voice not her own was shouting for the whole street to hear: “Pasha! Patulya!”

He had been walking with her all the while, amusing her with a highly skillful imitation of the last orator, and had suddenly vanished in the turmoil when the dragoons fell upon them.

In the skirmish, Marfa Gavrilovna herself got hit in the back by a whip, and though her thick, cotton-quilted coat kept her from feeling the blow, she cursed and shook her fist at the retreating cavalry, indignant that they had dared to lash her, an old woman, with a whip before the eyes of all honest people.

Marfa Gavrilovna cast worried glances down both sides of the street. Luckily, she suddenly saw the boy on the opposite sidewalk. There, in the narrow space between a colonial shop and a projecting town house, crowded a bunch of chance gawkers.

A dragoon who had ridden up onto the sidewalk was pressing them into that nook with the rump and flanks of his horse. He was amused by their terror and, barring their way out, performed capers and pirouettes under their noses, then backed his horse away and slowly, as in the circus, made him rear up. Suddenly he saw ahead his comrades slowly returning, spurred his horse, and in two or three leaps took his place in their line.

The people packed into the nook dispersed. Pasha, who had been afraid to call out, rushed to the old woman.

They walked home. Marfa Gavrilovna grumbled all the while. “Cursed murderers, fiendish butchers! People are rejoicing, the tsar has given them freedom, and they can’t stand it. They’ve got to muck it all up, turn every word inside out.”

She was angry with the dragoons, with the whole world around her, and at that moment even with her own son. In this moment of passion it seemed to her that everything going on now was all the tricks of Kuprinka’s blunderers, whom she nicknamed duds and smart alecks.

“Wicked vipers! What do the loudmouths want? They’ve got no brains! Nothing but barking and squabbling. And that speechifier, how about him, Pashenka? Show me, dear, show me. Oh, I’ll die, I’ll die! It’s perfect, it’s him to a tee! Yackety-yack-yack-yack. Ah, you buzzing little gadfly!”

At home she fell upon her son with reproaches, that it was not for her, at her age, to be taught with a whip on the behind by a shaggy, pockmarked blockhead on a horse.

“For God’s sake, mama, what’s got into you? As if I really was some Cossack officer or sheik of police!”

9

Nikolai Nikolaevich was standing at the window when the fleeing people appeared. He understood that they were from the demonstration, and for some time he looked into the distance to see if Yura or anyone else was among the scattering people. However, no acquaintances appeared, only once he fancied he saw that one (Nikolai Nikolaevich forgot his name), Dudorov’s son, pass by quickly—a desperate boy, who just recently had had a bullet extracted from his left shoulder and who was again hanging about where he had no business to be.

Nikolai Nikolaevich had arrived in the fall from Petersburg. He had no lodgings of his own in Moscow, and he did not want to go to a hotel. He stayed with the Sventitskys, his distant relations. They put him in the corner study upstairs on the mezzanine.

This two-storied wing, too big for the childless Sventitsky couple, had been rented from the Princes Dolgoruky by Sventitsky’s late parents from time immemorial. The Dolgoruky domain, with three courtyards, a garden, and a multitude of variously styled buildings scattered over it in disorder, gave onto three lanes and bore the old name of Flour Town.

Despite its four windows, the study was rather dark. It was cluttered with books, papers, rugs, and etchings. On the outside, the study had a balcony that ran in a semicircle around that corner of the building. The double glass door to the balcony had been sealed off for the winter.

Through two of the study windows and the glass of the balcony door, the whole length of the lane was visible—a sleigh road running into the distance, little houses in a crooked line, crooked fences.

Violet shadows reached from the garden into the study. Trees peered into the room, looking as if they wanted to strew the floor with their branches covered with heavy hoarfrost, which resembled lilac streams of congealed stearine.

Nikolai Nikolaevich was looking into the lane and remembering the last Petersburg winter, Gapon, Gorky, the visit of Witte, the fashionable contemporary writers.⁷ From that turmoil he had fled here, to the peace and quiet of the former capital, to write the book he had in mind. Forget it! He had gone from the frying pan into the fire. Lectures and talks every day—he had no time to catch his breath. At the Women’s Institute, at the Religious-Philosophical Society, for the benefit of the Red Cross, for the Fund of the Strike Committee. Oh, to go to Switzerland, to the depths of some wooded canton. Peace and serenity over a lake, the sky and the mountains, and the vibrant, ever-echoing, alert air.

Nikolai Nikolaevich turned away from the window. He had an urge to go and visit someone or simply to go outside with no purpose. But then he remembered that the Tolstoyan Vyvolochnov was supposed to come to him on business and he could not leave. He started pacing the room. His thoughts turned to his nephew.

When Nikolai Nikolaevich moved to Petersburg from the backwoods of the Volga region, he brought Yura to Moscow, to the family circles of the Vedenyapins, the Ostromyslenskys, the Selyavins, the Mikhaelises, the Sventitskys, and the Gromekos. At the beginning, Yura was settled with the scatterbrained old babbler Ostromyslensky, whom his relations simply called Fedka. Fedka privately cohabited with his ward, Motya, and therefore considered himself a shaker of the foundations, the champion of an idea. He did not justify the trust put in him and even turned out to be light-fingered, spending for his own benefit the money allotted for Yura’s upkeep. Yura was transferred to the professorial family of the Gromekos, where he remained to this day.

At the Gromekos’ Yura was surrounded by an enviably propitious atmosphere.

“They have a sort of triumvirate there,” thought Nikolai Nikolaevich, “Yura, his friend and schoolmate Gordon, and the daughter of the family, Tonya Gromeko. This triple alliance has read itself up on The Meaning of Love and The Kreutzer Sonata, and is mad about the preaching of chastity.”⁸

Adolescence has to pass through all the frenzies of purity. But they are overdoing it, they have gone beyond all reason.

They are terribly extravagant and childish. The realm of the sensual that troubles them so much, they for some reason call “vulgarity,” and they use this expression both aptly and inaptly. A very unfortunate choice of words! The “vulgar”—for them it is the voice of instinct, and pornographic literature, and the exploitation of women, and all but the entire world of the physical. They blush and blanch when they pronounce the word!

If I had been in Moscow, thought Nikolai Nikolaevich, I would not have let it go so far. Modesty is necessary, and within certain limits …

“Ah, Nil Feoktistovich! Come in, please,” he exclaimed and went to meet his visitor.

10

Into the room came a fat man in a gray shirt girded with a wide belt. He was wearing felt boots, and his trousers were baggy at the knees. He made the impression of a kindly fellow who lived in the clouds. On his nose a small pince-nez on a wide black ribbon bobbed angrily.

Divesting himself in the front hall, he had not finished the job. He had not taken off his scarf, the end of which dragged on the floor, and his round felt hat was still in his hands. These things hampered his movements and prevented Vyvolochnov not only from shaking Nikolai Nikolaevich’s hand, but even from greeting him verbally.

“Umm,” he grunted perplexedly, looking into all the corners.

“Put it wherever you like,” said Nikolai Nikolaevich, restoring to Vyvolochnov his gift of speech and his composure.

He was one of those followers of Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy in whose heads the thoughts of the genius who had never known peace settled down to enjoy a long and cloudless repose and turned irremediably petty.

Vyvolochnov had come to ask Nikolai Nikolaevich to appear at a benefit for political exiles at some school.

“I’ve already lectured there.”

“At a benefit for political exiles?”

“Yes.”

“You’ll have to do it again.”

Nikolai Nikolaevich resisted at first but then agreed.

The object of the visit was exhausted. Nikolai Nikolaevich was not keeping Nil Feoktistovich. He could get up and leave. But it seemed improper to Vyvolochnov to leave so soon. It was necessary to say something lively and unforced in farewell. A strained and unpleasant conversation began.

“So you’ve become a decadent? Gone in for mysticism?”

“Why so?”

“A lost man. Remember the zemstvo?”

“Of course I do. We worked on the elections together.”

“We fought for village schools and teachers’ education. Remember?”

“Of course. Those were hot battles.”

“Afterwards I believe you went into public health and social welfare? Right?”

“For a while.”

“Mm—yes. And now it’s these fauns, nenuphars, ephebes, and ‘let’s be like the sun.’⁹ For the life of me, I can’t believe it. That an intelligent man with a sense of humor and such knowledge of the people … Drop it all, please … Or maybe I’m intruding … Something cherished?”

“Why throw words around at random without thinking? What are we quarreling about? You don’t know my thoughts.”

“Russia needs schools and hospitals, not fauns and nenuphars.”

“No one disputes that.”

“The muzhiks go naked and swollen with hunger …”

The conversation progressed by such leaps. Aware beforehand of the futility of these attempts, Nikolai Nikolaevich began to explain what brought him close to certain writers of the symbolist school, and then went on to Tolstoy.

“I’m with you up to a point. But Lev Nikolaevich says that the more a man gives himself to beauty, the more he distances himself from the good.”

“And you think it’s the other way round? Beauty will save the world, mysteries and all that, Rozanov and Dostoevsky?”¹⁰

“Wait, I’ll tell you what I think myself. I think that if the beast dormant in man could be stopped by the threat of, whatever, the lockup or requital beyond the grave, the highest emblem of mankind would be a lion tamer with his whip, and not the preacher who sacrifices himself. But the point is precisely this, that for centuries man has been raised above the animals and borne aloft not by the rod, but by music: the irresistibility of the unarmed truth, the attraction of its example. It has been considered up to now that the most important thing in the Gospels is the moral pronouncements and rules, but for me the main thing is that Christ speaks in parables from daily life, clarifying the truth with the light of everyday things. At the basis of this lies the thought that communion among mortals is immortal and that life is symbolic because it is meaningful.”

“I understand nothing. You should write a book about it.”

When Vyvolochnov left, Nikolai Nikolaevich was overcome by a terrible irritation. He was angry with himself for blurting out some of his innermost thoughts to that blockhead Vyvolochnov without making the slightest impression on him. As sometimes happens, Nikolai Nikolaevich’s vexation suddenly changed direction. He forgot all about Vyvolochnov, as if he had never existed. He recalled something else. He did not keep a diary, but once or twice a year he wrote down in his thick notebook the thoughts that struck him most. He took out the notebook and began jotting in a large, legible hand. Here is what he wrote:

“Beside myself all day because of this foolish Schlesinger woman. She comes in the morning, sits till dinnertime, and for a whole two hours tortures me reading that galimatias. A poetic text by the symbolist A for the cosmogonic symphony of the composer B, with the spirits of the planets, the voices of the four elements, etc., etc. I suffered it for a while, then couldn’t take it anymore and begged her, please, to spare me.

“I suddenly understood it all. I understood why it is always so killingly unbearable and false, even in Faust. It is an affected, sham interest. Modern man has no such quests. When he is overcome by the riddles of the universe, he delves into physics, not into Hesiod’s hexameters.¹¹

“But the point is not only the outdatedness of these forms, their anachronism. The point is not that these spirits of fire and water again darkly entangle what science had brightly disentangled. The point is that this genre contradicts the whole spirit of today’s art, its essence, its motive forces.

“These cosmogonies were natural to the old earth, so sparsely populated by man that he did not yet obscure nature. Mammoths still wandered over it, and the memories of dinosaurs and dragons were fresh. Nature leaped so manifestly into man’s eye and so rapaciously and tangibly onto his neck, that everything indeed might still have been filled with gods. Those were the very first pages of the chronicles of mankind, they were only the beginning.

“In Rome that ancient world ended from overpopulation.

“Rome was a marketplace of borrowed gods and conquered peoples, a two-tiered throng, on earth and in heaven, a swinishness that bound itself up in a triple knot, like twisted bowels. Dacians, Herulians, Scythians, Sarmatians, Hyperboreans, heavy, spokeless wheels, eyes wallowing in fat, bestiality, double chins, fish fed on the flesh of learned slaves, illiterate emperors. There were more people in the world than ever again, and they were squeezed into the passageways of the Coliseum and suffered.

“And then into the glut of this gold and marble tastelessness came this one, light and clothed in radiance, emphatically human, deliberately provincial, a Galilean, and from that moment peoples and gods ceased, and man began, man the carpenter, man the tiller, man the shepherd with his flock of sheep at sunset, man without a drop of proud sound, man gratefully dispersed through all mothers’ lullabies and through all the picture galleries of the world.”

11

The Petrovsky Lines made the impression of a corner of Petersburg in Moscow. The matching buildings on either side of the street, the entrances with tasteful stucco moldings, a bookshop, a reading room, a cartography establishment, a very decent tobacco store, a very decent restaurant, in front of the restaurant gaslights in frosted globes on massive brackets.

In winter the place frowned with gloomy haughtiness. Here lived serious, self-respecting, and well-paid people of the liberal professions.

Here Viktor Ippolitovich Komarovsky rented his luxurious bachelor quarters on the second floor, up a wide staircase with wide oak banisters. Solicitously entering into everything, and at the same time not interfering with anything, Emma Ernestovna, his housekeeper—no, the matron of his quiet seclusion—managed his household inaudibly and invisibly, and he repaid her with chivalrous gratitude, natural in such a gentleman, and did not suffer the presence in his apartment of guests and lady visitors incompatible with her untroubled, old-maidenly world. With them reigned the peace of a monastic cloister—drawn blinds, not a speck, not a spot, as in an operating room.

On Sundays before dinner Viktor Ippolitovich was in the habit of strolling with his bulldog on Petrovka and Kuznetsky Most, and at one of the corners, Konstantin Illarionovich Satanidi, an actor and gambler, would come to join them.

Together they would set off to polish the pavements, exchanging brief jokes and observations so curt, insignificant, and filled with such scorn for everything in the world that without any loss they might have replaced those words with simple growls, as long as they filled both sides of Kuznetsky with their loud bass voices, shamelessly breathless, as if choking on their own vibrations.

12

The weather was trying to get better. “Drip, drip, drip” the drops drummed on the iron gutters and cornices. Roof tapped out to roof, as in springtime. It was a thaw.

She walked all the way home as if beside herself and only when she got there did she realize what had happened.

At home everyone was asleep. She again lapsed into torpor and in that distraction sank down at her mother’s dressing table in her pale lilac, almost white dress with lace trimmings and a long veil, taken from the shop for that one evening, as if for a masked ball. She sat before her reflection in the mirror and saw nothing. Then she leaned her crossed arms on the table and dropped her head on them.

If mama finds out, she’ll kill her. Kill her and then take her own life.

How did it happen? How could it happen? Now it’s too late. She should have thought earlier.

Now she’s—what is it called?—now she’s—a fallen woman. She’s a woman from a French novel, and tomorrow she will go to school and sit at the same desk with those girls, who, compared to her, are still unweaned babies. Lord, Lord, how could it happen!

Someday, many, many years from now, when it was possible, she would tell Olya Demina. Olya would clutch her by the head and start howling.

Outside the window the drops prattled, the thaw was talking away. Someone in the street banged on the neighbors’ gate. Lara did not raise her head. Her shoulders shook. She was weeping.

13

“Ah, Emma Ernestovna, dearest, that’s of no importance. It’s tiresome.”

He was flinging things around on the carpet and sofa, cuffs and shirt fronts, and opening and closing the drawers of the chest, not understanding what he wanted.

He needed her desperately, and to see her that Sunday was impossible. He rushed about the room like a beast, unable to settle anywhere.

She was incomparable in her inspired loveliness. Her arms amazed one, as one can be astonished by a lofty way of thinking. Her shadow on the wallpaper of the hotel room seemed the silhouette of her uncorruption. The nightshirt stretched over her breasts was ingenuous and taut, like a piece of linen on an embroidery frame.

Komarovsky drummed his fingers on the windowpane in rhythm with the horses’ hoofs unhurriedly clattering over the asphalt of the street downstairs. “Lara”—he whispered and closed his eyes, and her head mentally appeared in his hands, her sleeping head with its eyelashes lowered, knowing not that it had been gazed at sleeplessly for hours on end. Her shock of hair, scattered in disorder over the pillow, stung Komarovsky’s eyes with the smoke of its beauty and penetrated his soul.

His Sunday stroll did not come off. Komarovsky went several steps down the sidewalk with Jack and stopped. He imagined Kuznetsky, Satanidi’s jokes, the stream of acquaintances he was going to meet. No, it was beyond his strength! How repugnant it had all become! Komarovsky turned back. The surprised dog rested his disapproving gaze on him from below and reluctantly trudged after him.

“What is this bedevilment?” he thought. “What does it all mean?” Was it awakened conscience, a feeling of pity or repentance? Or was it worry? No, he knew she was safe at home. Why, then, could he not get her out of his head!

Komarovsky went through the front door, went upstairs to the landing, and turned. There was a Venetian window with ornamental coats of arms in the corners of the glass. It cast colored reflections on the floor and the windowsill. Halfway up the next flight Komarovsky stopped.

Do not give in to this gnawing, martyrizing anguish! He is not a boy, he must realize how it would be for him if, from a means of diversion, this girl, his late friend’s daughter, this child, should turn into the object of his madness. Come to your senses! Be true to yourself, don’t change your habits. Otherwise everything will fly to pieces.

Komarovsky squeezed the wide banister with his hand until it hurt, closed his eyes for a moment, and, resolutely turning back, began to go downstairs. On the landing with the sun reflections he caught the adoring gaze of his bulldog. Jack was looking at him from below, raising his head like a slobbering old dwarf with sagging cheeks.

The dog did not like the girl, tore her stockings, growled and snarled at her. He was jealous of Lara, as if fearing that his master might get infected by her with something human.

“Ah, so that’s it! You’ve decided everything will be as before—Satanidi, the meanness, the jokes? Take that, then, take that, take that, take that!”

He started kicking the bulldog and beating him with his cane. Jack made his escape, howling and squealing, and, his behind twitching, hobbled up the stairs to scratch at the door and complain to Emma Ernestovna.

Days and weeks went by.

14

Oh, what a vicious circle it was! If Komarovsky’s irruption into Lara’s life had aroused only her revulsion, Lara would have rebelled and broken free. But things were not so simple.

The girl was flattered that a handsome, graying man who could have been her father, who was applauded in assemblies and written about in the newspapers, spent money and time on her, called her goddess, took her to theaters and concerts and, as they say, “improved her mind.”

And here she was still an immature schoolgirl in a brown dress, a secret participant in innocent school conspiracies and pranks. Komarovsky’s lovemaking somewhere in a carriage under the coachman’s nose or in the secluded back of a loge before the eyes of the whole theater fascinated her by its covert boldness and prompted the little demon awakened in her to imitation.

But this naughty schoolgirl daring was quickly passing. An aching sense of brokenness and horror at herself had long been taking root in her. And she wanted to sleep all the time. From not sleeping enough at night, from tears and eternal headaches, from schoolwork and general physical fatigue.

15

He was her curse, she hated him. Every day she went over these thoughts afresh.

Now she’s his slave for life. How has he enslaved her? How does he extort her submission, so that she succumbs, plays up to his desires, and delights him with the shudders of her unvarnished shame? Is it his age, mama’s financial dependence on him, his skill in frightening her, Lara? No, no, no. That’s all nonsense.

It’s not she who is subordinate to him, but he to her. Doesn’t she see how he languishes after her? She has nothing to be afraid of, her conscience is clear. It is he who should be ashamed and frightened, if she should expose him. But the thing is that she will never do it. For that she does not have enough baseness, which is Komarovsky’s main strength in dealing with the subordinate and weak.

That is where they differ. And that also makes for the horror of life all around. How does it stun you—with thunder and lightning? No, with sidelong glances and whispers of calumny. It’s all trickery and ambiguity. A single thread is like a spiderweb, pull and it’s gone, but try to free yourself and you get even more entangled.

And the base and weak rule over the strong.

16

She said to herself: “And what if I was married? How would it be different?” She entered on the path of sophistry. But at times a hopeless anguish came over her.

How can he not be ashamed to lie at her feet and implore her: “It can’t go on like this. Think what I’ve done to you. You’re sliding down a steep slope. Let’s tell your mother. I’ll marry you.”

And he wept and insisted, as if she were arguing and disagreeing. But it was all just phrases, and Lara did not even listen to those tragic, empty-sounding words.

And he went on taking her, under a long veil, to the private rooms of that terrible restaurant, where the waiters and customers followed her with their gazes as if undressing her. And she only asked herself: Does one humiliate the person one loves?

Once she had a dream. She is under the ground, all that remains of her is her left side with its shoulder and her right foot. A clump of grass is growing from her left nipple, and aboveground they are singing: “Dark eyes and white breasts” and “Tell Masha not to cross the river.”

17

Lara was not religious. She did not believe in rites. But sometimes, in order to endure life, she needed it to be accompanied by some inner music. She could not invent such music each time for herself. This music was the word of God about life, and Lara went to church to weep over it.

Once at the beginning of December, when Lara’s inner state was like Katerina’s in The Storm,¹² she went to pray with such a feeling as if the earth were about to open under her and the church’s vaults to collapse. And it would serve her right. And everything would be over. Only it was a pity she had taken that chatterbox, Olya Demina, with her.

“Prov Afanasyevich,” Olya whispered in her ear.

“Shh. Let me be, please. What Prov Afanasyevich?”

“Prov Afanasyevich Sokolov. Mother’s second cousin. The one who’s reading.”

“Ah, she means the psalm-reader. Tiverzin’s relation. Shh. Be quiet. Don’t bother me, please.”

They had come at the beginning of the service. The psalm “Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless His holy name” was being sung.¹³

The church was rather empty and echoing. Only towards the front were people crowded in a compact group. It was a newly built church. The colorless glass of the window did not brighten in any way the gray, snow-covered lane and the people driving or walking up and down it. The church warden stood by that window and, loud enough for the whole church to hear, paying no attention to the service, admonished some deaf woman, a ragged holy fool, and his voice was of the same conventional, everyday sort as the window and the lane.

While Lara, slowly going around the praying people, copper money clutched in her hand, went to the door to buy candles for herself and Olya, and went back just as carefully, so as not to push anyone, Prov Afanasyevich managed to rattle off the nine beatitudes,¹⁴ like something well-known to everyone without him.

Blessed are the poor in spirit … Blessed are those who mourn … Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness …

Lara walked, suddenly shuddered, and stopped. That was about her. He says: Enviable is the lot of the downtrodden. They have something to tell about themselves. They have everything before them. So He thought. It was Christ’s opinion.

18

Those were the Presnya days.¹⁵ They found themselves in the zone of the uprising. A few steps away from them, on Tverskaya, a barricade was being built. It could be seen from the living-room window. People were fetching buckets of water from their courtyard to pour over the barricade and bind the stones and scraps of metal it was made of in an armor of ice.

The neighboring courtyard was a gathering place of the people’s militia, a sort of first-aid station or canteen.

Two boys used to come there. Lara knew them both. One was Nika Dudorov, a friend of Nadya’s, at whose house Lara had made his acquaintance. He was of Lara’s ilk—direct, proud, and taciturn. He resembled Lara and did not interest her.

The other was a student at a progressive school, Antipov, who lived with old Tiverzina, Olya Demina’s grandmother. When visiting Marfa Gavrilovna, Lara began to notice what effect she had on the boy. Pasha Antipov was still so childishly simple that he did not conceal the bliss her visits afforded him, as if Lara were some sort of birch grove during summer vacation, with clean grass and clouds, and he could express his calfish raptures to her unhindered, with no fear of being laughed at for it.

As soon as she noticed the sort of influence she had on him, Lara unconsciously began to take advantage of it. However, she busied herself with the more serious taming of that soft and yielding nature after several years, at a much later season of her friendship with him, when Patulya already knew that he loved her to distraction and that in his life there was no more turning back.

The boys were playing at the most dreadful and adult of games, at war, and moreover of a sort that you were hanged or exiled for taking part in. Yet the ends of their bashlyks¹⁶ were tied at the back with such knots that it gave them away as children and showed that they still had papas and mamas. Lara looked at them as a big girl looks at little boys. There was a bloom of innocence on their dangerous amusements. They imparted the same stamp to everything else. To the frosty evening, overgrown with such shaggy hoarfrost that its thickness made it look not white but black. To the blue courtyard. To the house opposite, where the boys were hiding. And, above all, to the pistol shots that cracked from it all the time. “The boys are shooting,” thought Lara. She thought it not of Nika and Patulya, but of the whole shooting city. “Good, honest boys,” she thought. “They’re good, that’s why they’re shooting.”

19

They learned that cannon fire might be directed at the barricade and that their house was in danger. It was too late to think of moving in with acquaintances somewhere in another part of Moscow: their area was surrounded. They had to look for a niche closer by, within the circle. They remembered the Montenegro.

It turned out that they were not the first. The entire hotel was occupied. Many had found themselves in their situation. But being remembered of old, they were promised quarters in the linen room.

They gathered everything necessary into three bundles, so as not to attract attention with suitcases, and began putting off the move to the hotel from day to day.

Owing to the patriarchal customs that reigned in the shop, work went on until the last minute, despite the strike. Then, in the cold, dull twilight, the outside door bell rang. Someone came with claims and reproaches. The owner was asked to come to the door. To soothe these passions, Faïna Silantievna went out to the front hall.

“Come here, girls!” she soon called the seamstresses there and began introducing them in turn to the visitor. He greeted each of them separately with a handshake, feelingly and clumsily, and left, having come to some agreement with Fetisova.

Returning to the big room, the seamstresses began wrapping themselves in shawls and flinging their arms up over their heads, putting them through the sleeves of tight-fitting fur coats.

“What’s happened?” asked Amalia Karlovna, just coming in.

“They’ve tooken us out, madame. We’re on strike.”

“Maybe I … Have I done you any wrong?” Mme Guichard burst into tears.

“Don’t be upset, Amalia Karlovna. We’re not angry with you, we’re very grateful to you. But the talk’s not about you and us. It’s the same now with everybody, the whole world. And how can you go against everybody?”

They all went home, even Olya Demina and Faïna Silantievna, who whispered to the mistress as she was leaving that she had staged this strike for the benefit of her and the business. But she would not be appeased.

“What black ingratitude! Just think how mistaken one can be about people! This girl on whom I spent so much of my soul! Well, all right, let’s say she’s a child. But that old witch!”

“Try to understand, mama, they can’t make an exception for you,” Lara comforted her. “Nobody’s angry with you. On the contrary. Everything that’s going on around us now is being done in the name of man, in defense of the weak, for the good of women and children. Yes, yes, don’t shake your head so mistrustfully. It will be better someday for me and you because of it.”

But her mother did not understand anything.

“It’s always this way,” she said, sobbing. “My thoughts are confused to begin with, and then you blurt things out that just make me roll my eyes. They dump on my head, and it turns out to be in my own interest. No, truly, I must have gone soft in the brain.”

Rodya was at the corps. Lara and her mother wandered about the empty house alone. The unlit street looked into the rooms with vacant eyes. The rooms returned the same gaze.

“Let’s go to the hotel, mama, before it gets too dark. Do you hear, mama? Without putting it off, right now.”

“Filat, Filat,” they called the yard porter. “Filat, dearest, take us to the Montenegro.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Take the bundles, and another thing, Filat, please look after the place in the meantime. And don’t forget seed and water for Kirill Modestovich. And keep everything locked. Oh, and please come to see us there.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Thank you, Filat. Christ save you. Well, let’s sit down before we go, and God be with us.”

They went outside and did not recognize the air, as after a long illness. Through the frosty expanse, polished like new, round, smooth sounds, as if turned on a lathe, rolled lightly in all directions. Salvoes and gunshots smacked, splatted, and slapped, flattening the distances into a pancake.

Much as Filat tried to dissuade them, Lara and Amalia Karlovna considered these shots blanks.

“You’re a little fool, Filat. Judge for yourself, how could they not be blanks if you can’t see who’s shooting. Who do you think is shooting, the Holy Spirit or something? Of course they’re blanks.”

At one of the intersections a patrol stopped them. They were searched by grinning Cossacks, who brazenly felt them from head to foot. Their visorless caps with chin straps were cocked dashingly over the ear. They all looked one-eyed.

What luck, thought Lara, she will not see Komarovsky for the whole time that they are cut off from the rest of the city! She cannot break with him on account of her mother. She cannot say: Mama, don’t receive him. Or else everything will be given away. So what? Why be afraid of that? Ah, God, let it all go to the devil, as long as it’s over. Lord, Lord, Lord! She’ll fall senseless in the middle of the street right now from revulsion. What did she just remember?! How is it called, that horrible painting with the fat Roman in it, in that first private room where it all began? The Woman or the Vase.¹⁷ Why, of course. A famous painting. The Woman or the Vase. And she was not yet a woman then, to be likened to such a treasure. That came later. The table was so sumptuously set.

“Where are you running like crazy? I can’t go so fast,” Amalia Karlovna wailed behind her, breathing heavily and barely keeping up with her.

Lara was moving quickly. Some force bore her up, as if she were walking on air—a proud, inspiring force.

“Oh, how perkily the gunshots crack,” she thought. “Blessed are the violated, blessed are the ensnared. God give you good health, gunshots! Gunshots, gunshots, you’re of the same opinion!”

20

The Gromeko brothers’ house stood at the corner of Sivtsev Vrazhek and another lane. Alexander Alexandrovich and Nikolai Alexandrovich Gromeko were professors of chemistry, the first at the Petrovskaya Academy, the second at the university. Nikolai Alexandrovich was a bachelor; Alexander Alexandrovich was married to Anna Ivanovna, née Krüger, the daughter of a steel magnate and owner of abandoned, unprofitable mines on the enormous forest dacha¹⁸ that belonged to him near Yuryatin in the Urals.

The house was two-storied. The upper, with bedrooms, a schoolroom, Alexander Alexandrovich’s study and library, Anna Ivanovna’s boudoir, and Tonya’s and Yura’s rooms, was the living quarters, and the lower was for receptions. Thanks to its pistachio-colored curtains, the mirrorlike reflections on the lid of the grand piano, the aquarium, the olive-green furniture, and the indoor plants that resembled seaweed, this lower floor made the impression of a green, drowsily undulating sea bottom.

The Gromekos were cultivated people, hospitable, and great connoisseurs and lovers of music. They gathered company at their home and organized evenings of chamber music at which piano trios, violin sonatas, and string quartets were performed.

In January of 1906, soon after Nikolai Nikolaevich’s departure abroad, the next of these chamber concerts on Sivtsev Vrazhek was to take place. They planned to perform a new violin sonata by a beginner from Taneev’s school and a Tchaikovsky trio.

Preparations began the day before. Furniture was moved to free the concert hall. In the corner a tuner produced the same note a hundred times and then spilled out the beads of an arpeggio. In the kitchen fowl were plucked, greens were washed, mustard was beaten with olive oil for sauces and dressings.

In the morning Shura Schlesinger, Anna Ivanovna’s bosom friend and confidante, came to bother them.

Shura Schlesinger was a tall, lean woman with regular features and a somewhat masculine face, which gave her a slight resemblance to the sovereign, especially in her gray lambskin hat, which she wore cocked and kept on when visiting, just barely lifting the little veil pinned to it.

In periods of sorrow and care, the conversations between the two friends afforded them mutual relief. The relief consisted in Shura Schlesinger and Anna Ivanovna exchanging biting remarks of an ever more caustic nature. A stormy scene would break out, quickly ending in tears and reconciliation. These regular quarrels had a tranquilizing effect on both women, like leeches on the bloodstream.

Shura Schlesinger had been married several times, but she forgot her husbands immediately after the divorce and attached so little significance to them that there was in all her habits the cold mobility of the single woman.

Shura Schlesinger was a Theosophist,¹⁹ but at the same time she had such excellent knowledge of the course of the Orthodox services that even when toute transportée,^* in a state of complete ecstasy, she could not help prompting the clergy on what they should say or sing. “Hear me, O Lord,” “again and oftentimes,” “more honorable than the cherubim”—her husky, broken patter could be heard escaping her all the time.

Shura Schlesinger knew mathematics, Hindu mysticism, the addresses of the most important professors of Moscow Conservatory, who was living with whom, and, my God, what did she not know? Therefore she was invited as an arbiter and monitor in all serious situations in life.

At the appointed hour the guests began to arrive. Adelaïda Filippovna came, Gintz, the Fufkovs, Mr. and Mrs. Basurman, the Verzhitskys, Colonel Kavkaztsev. It was snowing, and when the front door was opened, the tangled air raced past, all as if in knots from the flitting of big and little snowflakes. Men came in from the cold, their deep rubber boots flopping loosely on their feet, affecting one after the other to be absent-minded, clumsy fellows, while their wives, freshened by the frost, the two upper buttons of their fur coats undone, their fluffy kerchiefs pushed back on their frosty hair, were, on the contrary, images of the inveterate rogue, perfidy itself, not to be trifled with. “Cui’s nephew,” the whisper went around, on the arrival of a new pianist, invited to the house for the first time.²⁰

From the concert hall, through the opened side doors at both ends, they could see a laid table, long as a winter road, in the dining room. The eye was struck by the bright sparkle of rowanberry vodka in bottles with granular facets. The imagination was captivated by little cruets of oil and vinegar on silver stands, and the picturesqueness of the game and snacks, and even the napkins folded in little pyramids that crowned each place setting, and the almond-scented blue-violet cineraria in baskets seemed to excite the appetite. So as not to delay the desired moment of savoring earthly food, they turned as quickly as possible to the spiritual. They sat down in rows in the hall. “Cui’s nephew”—the whispering was renewed when the pianist took his place at the instrument. The concert began.

The sonata was known to be dull and forced, cerebral. It fulfilled expectations, and moreover proved to be terribly drawn out.

During the intermission there was an argument about it between the critic Kerimbekov and Alexander Alexandrovich. The critic denounced the sonata, and Alexander Alexandrovich defended it. Around them people smoked and noisily moved chairs from place to place.

But again their gazes fell upon the ironed tablecloth that shone in the next room. Everyone suggested that the concert continue without delay.

The pianist glanced sidelong at the public and nodded to his partners to begin. The violinist and Tyshkevich swung their bows. The trio burst into sobs.

Yura, Tonya, and Misha Gordon, who now spent half his life at the Gromekos’, were sitting in the third row.

“Egorovna’s making signs to you,” Yura whispered to Alexander Alexandrovich, who was sitting directly in front of him.

On the threshold of the hall stood Agrafena Egorovna, the Gromeko family’s old, gray-haired maid, and with desperate looks in Yura’s and equally resolute nods in Alexander Alexandrovich’s direction, gave Yura to understand that she urgently needed the host.

Alexander Alexandrovich turned his head, looked at Egorovna reproachfully, and shrugged his shoulders. But Egorovna would not calm down. Soon an exchange started between them, from one end of the hall to the other, as between two deaf-mutes. Eyes turned towards them. Anna Ivanovna cast annihilating glances at her husband.

Alexander Alexandrovich stood up. Something had to be done. He blushed, quietly went around the room by the corner, and approached Egorovna.

“Shame on you, Egorovna! Really, what’s this sudden urgency? Well, be quick, what’s happened?”

Egorovna started whispering something to him.

“From what Montenegro?”

“The hotel.”

“Well, what is it?”

“He’s wanted without delay. Somebody’s dying there.”

“So it’s dying now. I can imagine. Impossible, Egorovna. They’ll finish playing the piece, and I’ll tell him. It’s impossible before.”

“They’re waiting from the hotel. And the cab, too. I’m telling you, somebody’s dying, don’t you understand? An upper-class lady.”

“No and no again. Look, five minutes is no big thing.”

With the same quiet step along the wall, Alexander Alexandrovich returned to his place and sat down, frowning and rubbing the bridge of his nose.

After the first part, he went up to the performers and, while the applause thundered, told Tyshkevich that they had come for him, there was some sort of unpleasantness, and the music would have to be stopped. Then, holding up his palms to the hall, Alexander Alexandrovich silenced the applause and said loudly:

“Ladies and gentlemen. The trio must be interrupted. Let us express our sympathy with Fadei Kazimirovich. There is some trouble. He is forced to leave us. In such a moment, I do not wish to leave him alone. My presence may prove necessary. I will go with him. Yurochka, go, my dear boy, tell Semyon to come to the front porch, he’s been harnessed up for a long time. Ladies and gentlemen, I am not saying good-bye. I beg you all to stay. My absence will be brief.”

The boys begged Alexander Alexandrovich to let them ride with him through the night frost.

21

Despite the restoring of the normal flow of life, there was still shooting here and there after December, and the new fires, of the sort that always happened, looked like the smoldering remains of the earlier ones.

Never before had they driven so far and long as that night. It was within arm’s reach—down Smolensky, Novinsky, and half of Sadovaya. But the brutal frost and the mist isolated the separate parts of dislocated space, as if it were not identical everywhere in the world. The shaggy, shredded smoke of the bonfires, the creak of footsteps and squeal of runners contributed to the impression that they had already been driving God knows how long and had gone somewhere terribly far away.

In front of the hotel stood a blanket-covered horse with bandaged pasterns, hitched to a narrow, jaunty sleigh. The cabby sat in the passenger seat, covering his muffled head with his mittened hands for warmth.

The vestibule was warm, and behind the rail separating the coatroom from the entrance, a doorman dozed, lulled by the sound of the ventilator, the hum of the burning stove, and the whistle of the boiling samovar, snoring loudly and waking himself up by it.

To the left in the vestibule, before a mirror, stood a made-up lady, her plump face floury with powder. She was wearing a fur jacket, too airy for such weather. The lady was waiting for someone from upstairs and, turning her back to the mirror, glanced at herself now over her right, then over her left shoulder, to see how she looked from behind.

A chilled cabby poked himself through the front door. The shape of his kaftan resembled a cruller on a signboard, and the steam that billowed around him increased the likeness.

“Will it be soon now, mamzelle?” he asked the lady at the mirror. “Mixing with your kind’ll only get my horse frozen.”

The incident in number 24 was a minor thing among the ordinary everyday vexations of the staff. Bells jangled every moment and numbers popped up in the long glass box on the wall, showing where and under which number someone had lost his mind and, not knowing what he wanted himself, gave the floor attendants no peace.

Now this foolish old Guichard woman was being pumped full in number 24, was being given an emetic and having her guts and stomach flushed out. The maid Glasha was run off her feet, mopping the floor and carrying out dirty buckets and bringing in clean ones. But the present storm in the servants’ quarters began long before that turmoil, when there was nothing to talk about yet and Tereshka had not been sent in a cab for the doctor and this wretched fiddle scraper, before Komarovsky arrived and so many unnecessary people crowded in the corridor outside the door, hindering all movement.

Today’s hullabaloo flared up in the servants’ quarters because in the afternoon someone turned awkwardly in the narrow passage from the pantry and accidentally pushed the waiter Sysoy at the very moment when he, flexing slightly, was preparing to run through the door into the corridor with a loaded tray on his raised right hand. Sysoy dropped the tray, spilled the soup, and broke the dishes—three bowls and one plate.

Sysoy insisted that it was the dishwasher, she was to blame, and she should pay for the damage. It was nighttime now, past ten o’clock, the shift was about to go off work, and they still kept exchanging fire on the subject.

“He’s got the shakes in his arms and legs, all he worries about is hugging a bottle day and night like a wife, his nose stuck in drink like a duck’s, and then—why’d they push him, smash the dishes, spill the fish soup! Who pushed you, you cross-eyed devil, you spook? Who pushed you, you Astrakhan rupture, you shameless gape?”

“I done told you, Matryona Stepanovna—watch your tongue.”

“Something else again, if it was worthwhile making noise and smashing dishes, but this fine thing, Missy Prissy, a boulevard touch-me-not, done so well she gobbled arsenic, retired innocence. We’ve lived in the Montenegro, we’ve seen these screwtails and randy old goats.”

Misha and Yura paced up and down the corridor outside the door of the room. Nothing came out as Alexander Alexandrovich had supposed. He had pictured to himself—a cellist, a tragedy, something clean and dignified. But this was devil knows what. Filth, something scandalous, and absolutely not for children.

The boys loitered about in the corridor.

“Go in to the missis, young sirs,” the floor attendant, coming up to the boys, urged them for the second time in a soft, unhurried voice. “Go in, don’t hang back. She’s all right, rest assured. She’s her whole self now. You can’t stand here. We had a disaster here today, costly dishes got smashed. See—we’re serving, running, there’s no room. Go on in.”

The boys obeyed.

In the room, the lighted kerosene lamp had been taken from the holder in which it hung over the dining table and moved behind the wooden partition, which stank of bedbugs, to the other part of the room.

There was a sleeping nook there, separated from the front part and strangers’ eyes by a dusty curtain. Now, in the turmoil, they had forgotten to lower it. Its bottom end was thrown over the upper edge of the partition. The lamp stood on a bench in the alcove. This corner was lit up harshly from below, as if by theater footlights.

The poisoning was from iodine, not arsenic, as the dishwasher had mistakenly jibed. The room was filled with the sharp, astringent smell of young walnuts in unhardened green husks, which turn black at the touch.

Behind the partition, a maid was mopping the floor and a half-naked woman, wet with water, tears, and sweat, was lying on the bed, sobbing loudly, her head with strands of hair stuck together hanging over a basin. The boys at once averted their eyes, so embarrassing and indecent it was to look. But Yura had time to notice how, in certain uncomfortable, hunched-up poses, under the influence of strain and effort, a woman ceases to be the way she is portrayed in sculpture and comes to resemble a naked wrestler, with bulging muscles, in shorts for the match.

It finally occurred to someone behind the partition to lower the curtain.

“Fadei Kazimirovich, dear, where is your hand? Give me your hand,” the woman said, choking with tears and nausea. “Ah, I’ve been through such horror! I had such suspicions! Fadei Kazimirovich … I imagined … But fortunately it all turned out to be foolishness, my disturbed imagination, Fadei Kazimirovich, just think, such a relief! And as a result … And so … And so I’m alive.”

“Calm yourself, Amalia Karlovna, I beg you to calm yourself. How awkward this all is, my word, how awkward.”

“We’ll go home now,” Alexander Alexandrovich grunted, turning to the children.

Perishing with embarrassment, they stood in the dark entry, on the threshold of the unpartitioned part of the room, and, having nowhere to turn their eyes, looked into the depths of it, from which the lamp had been removed. The walls were hung with photographs, there was a bookcase with music scores, a desk littered with paper and albums, and on the other side of the dining table covered with a crocheted tablecloth, a girl slept sitting in an armchair, her arms around its back and her cheek pressed to it. She must have been mortally tired, if the noise and movement around her did not keep her from sleeping.

Their arrival had been senseless, their further presence here was indecent.

“We’ll go now,” Alexander Alexandrovich repeated. “Once Fadei Kazimirovich comes out. I’ll say good-bye to him.”

But instead of Fadei Kazimirovich, someone else came from behind the partition. This was a stout, clean-shaven, imposing, and self-assured man. Above his head he carried the lamp that had been taken from the holder. He went to the table by which the girl was sleeping and put the lamp into the holder. The light woke the girl up. She smiled at the man who had come in, narrowed her eyes, and stretched.

At the sight of the stranger, Misha became all aroused and simply riveted his eyes on him. He tugged at Yura’s sleeve, trying to tell him something.

“Aren’t you ashamed to whisper in a stranger’s house? What will people think of you?” Yura stopped him and refused to listen.

Meanwhile a mute scene was taking place between the girl and the man. They did not say a word to each other and only exchanged glances. But their mutual understanding was frighteningly magical, as if he were a puppeteer and she a puppet, obedient to the movements of his hand.

The weary smile that appeared on her face made the girl half close her eyes and half open her lips. But to the man’s mocking glances she responded with the sly winking of an accomplice. Both were pleased that everything had turned out so well, the secret had not been discovered, and the woman who poisoned herself had remained alive.

Yura devoured them both with his eyes. From the semi-darkness, where no one could see him, he looked into the circle of lamplight, unable to tear himself away. The spectacle of the girl’s enslavement was inscrutably mysterious and shamelessly candid. Contradictory feelings crowded in his breast. Yura’s heart was wrung by their as yet untried power.

This was the very thing he had so ardently yammered about for a year with Misha and Tonya under the meaningless name of vulgarity, that frightening and alluring thing which they had dealt with so easily at a safe distance in words, and here was that force before Yura’s eyes, thoroughly tangible and dim and dreamlike, pitilessly destructive and pitiful and calling for help, and where was their childish philosophy, and what was Yura to do now?

“Do you know who that man is?” Misha asked when they went outside. Yura was immersed in his thoughts and did not answer.

“It’s the same one who got your father to drink and destroyed him. Remember, on the train? I told you about it.”

Yura was thinking about the girl and the future, and not about his father and the past. For the first moment he did not even understand what Misha was telling him. It was hard to talk in the cold.

“Frozen, Semyon?” asked Alexander Alexandrovich.

They drove off.

*Quite carried away.