6
Negarat left in the evening. Their father accompanied him to the train. He came back from the station late at night, and his arrival set off a loud, long-lasting hubbub in the porter's lodge. Somebody came out with lanterns and called somebody else. It was raining buckets, and the geese, whom someone had let out, were cackling frantically.
A growly, shaky morning began. The wet, gray street bounced as if it were made of rubber. The nasty rain splashed mud, the coaches bounced on the paving stones and spit mud at pedestrians in overshoes.
Zhenya was returning home. Reverberations of the night's row in the yard could still be heard in the morning; she was not allowed to use the coach. She had said she wanted to buy some hemp seed and went to see her friend on foot. But halfway there, she realized that she could not find her way from the business quarter to the Defendovs' street and turned back. Then it also occurred to her that it was too early, Lisa would still be at school. She was wet to the skin and shivering. The wind grew stronger. But it grew no lighter. A cold, white light fell into the street and lay like leaves on the wet pavement. At the end of the square, behind the three-branched street lamp, dull, huddling clouds hurried in panic toward the town.
The man engaged in moving was either very untidy or impractical. The furniture from his modest workroom was not properly loaded on the cart, but was simply arranged in the same way it had stood in the room, and the castors on the armchairs which peeped from under the white covers glided over the planks as over a dancing floor with every jolt of the cart. The covers shimmered snow-white although they were soaked through. They hit the eye so glaringly that everything else took on their brightness: the paving stones pounded by the water, the shivering pools of water under the fences, the birds flying from the stables, the pieces of lead and even the fig tree in its bucket, which rocked to and fro and bowed clumsily from the cart to all the hurrying passers-by.
The cart was grotesque, and automatically attracted attention. A peasant was walking beside it. The cart listed sharply to one side and moved forward at a walking pace. And over all its groaning plunder hung the wet, leaden word “town”; it brought to life in the girl's head a number of images as fleeting as the cold October brilliance which flew along the street and fell upon the water.
“He will catch a cold when he unpacks his things,” she thought of the unknown owner. And she imagined a man, any man, as he moved about, staggering and with uneven steps, arranging his belongings in his new lodging. She saw vividly in her imagination his gestures and movements, especially the way he took a rag, limped around the bucket and wiped the hoar frost from the leaves of the fig tree. And she saw him catching the sniffles, the shakes, a fever. He would certainly catch a cold. Zhenya imagined all this vividly. The cart rumbled down the hill, toward the Isset. Zhenya had to turn left.
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It probably came from the heavy steps. The tea rose and fell in the glass on the bedside table. The slice of lemon floating in the tea rose and fell. The sun streaks on the carpet rocked to and fro. They swayed like columns, like rows of syrup bottles in shops with signboards showing a Turk smoking a pipe.
Showing a Turk ... smoking ... a pipe. Smoking ... a pipe ...
It probably came from the heavy steps. The sick girl went back to sleep.
Zhenya became ill the day after Negarat's departure, the day she learned on her walk that Aksinya had given birth to a boy, the day she imagined, when she saw the furniture cart, that its owner was threatened with rheumatism. For two weeks she lay in fever, covered with perspiration, sprinkled all over with red pepper which burned her and glued her eyelids and the corners of her mouth together. The perspiration drove her to distraction, and the awareness of shapeless statues mingled with the feeling of being stung. As if the flame that caused her to swell had been poured into her by a summer wasp. As if the sting, a thin gray bristle, had remained stuck in her and she tried to get it out in all possible waysâsometimes from her violet cheekbones, sometimes from the inflamed shoulder that groaned under the nightdress, sometimes from other places.
Then her convalescence started and the feeling of weakness permeated everything. This feeling of weakness abandoned itself, at its own peril, to a strange geometry that was peculiar to it and which produced a slight giddiness and nausea.
It started, for example, on the bedspread. The feeling of weakness piled up on the bedspread rows of gradually growing, empty rooms, which in the shivery twilight rapidly began to take the shape of a square which formed the basis of this mad game with space. Or else it loosened band after band from the wallpaper pattern, which made unique patterns before her eyes, as if they were swimming on oil; one pattern took the place of another, their dimensions grew slowly and steadily, like all these hallucinations, and tormented her. Or else the feeling of weakness tortured the girl with a sense of measureless depths which betrayed their bottomlessness instantly with the very first trick they played on the dancing floor. The bed sank quietly into the abyss and the girl sank with it. Her head was like a lump of sugar which is thrown into a yawning, empty chaos, dissolves and disappears.
It came from the heavy steps. The slice of lemon rose and fell. The sun on the wallpaper rose and set... .
Finally she woke up. Her mother came in and congratulated her on her recovery. Zhenya had the impression that her mother could read other people's thoughts. When she woke up, she had heard similar wordsâthe congratulations of her own hands, feet, elbows and knees, which she had accepted, stretching herself out. Their greeting had wakened her. And now Mama, too. It was a strange reunion.
The people in the house came and went, sat down and got up again. They asked questions and received answers. Some things had changed during her illness, others had remained unchanged. The former didn't touch her, the latter gave her no peace. Her mother had obviously not changed. Neither had her father. But certain things
had
changed: herself, Seryozha, the distribution of light in the room, the quiet of the other people and some other things.
Had it snowed? Only a little and it melted immediately. There was only a little frost, it was hard to say how things looked, naked, without snow. She hardly noticed whom she asked and what she asked. The answers seemed like a pressure forced on her. The healthy people came and went. Lisa came. There was an argument. Then it occurred to everyone that you can get measles only once and they let her in. Dikikh visited her. She hardly noticed which answers came from whom. When everybody was eating lunch and she was alone with Ulyasha, she remembered how everybody in the kitchen had once laughed over her silly questions. She would be careful now not to ask about such things. She would ask only sensible, relevant questions, in the tone of a grownup. She asked whether Aksinya was pregnant again. The girl rattled the spoon when she took away the glass. “But, my dear child, let her have a rest. She cannot keep on being pregnant, Zhenichka.” She ran out and left the door only half-closed. The whole kitchen rumbled as if the shelves had fallen with all their dishes, and laughter was followed by a loud hooting. It flew toward the cleaning woman, flared up under her hands, clattered and rattled as if a quarrel had passed into blows. Then somebody came and shut the forgotten door.
What is this? Will it thaw again? Then she would have to go by coach again today, for it wasn't yet possible to go by sleigh. With a chilly nose and hands stiff with cold, Zhenya stood a long time by the window. Dikikh had just left. He had been dissatisfied with her. How can one learn one's lessons when outside the roosters crow and the sky rumbles and when the rumble ceases, the roosters crow again? Black, dirty clouds like a naked cave. The day thrusts his snout at the windowpane like a calf in a steaming barn. Will spring ever come again? But since lunch a blue-gray frost encircles the air like a hoop, the sky becomes hollow and collapses, the clouds breathe audibly, with a whistling sound, the hurrying hours, flying northward toward the winter darkness, tear the last leaves from the trees, flatten the lawns, break through the chinks, pierce the breast. The mouths of northern storms yawn black behind the house, laden with November. But it is still October.
It is still October. No one can remember such a winter. People say the winter seeds will freeze. They fear a famine. It was as if somebody winked and drew a circle with a magic wand around chimneys, roofs and the starlings' boxes. There will be fog, snow and hoar frost. But until now, neither the one nor the other. The empty, hollow-cheeked twilight longs for them. It strains the eyes. The early lanterns and the lights in the houses hurt the earth, as one's head is hurt by a long waiting, when one stares into the distance with dim eyes. Everything waits tensely, the firewood is already piled in the kitchen, for two weeks the clouds have been filled to the brim with snow, the air is pregnant with darkness. But when will the wizard who casts a spell over everything the eye can see and binds it within a magic circle pronounce his incantation and call forth the winter whose breath already steams just outside the door?
How had they neglected it? Really, nobody had bothered about the calendar in the schoolroom. She tore off the leaves. Childish! But still, it was not August 29! “That's good,” Seryozha would have said. A red-letter day. The decapitation of John the Baptist. The calendar let itself be lifted easily from the nail. She tore off the leaves because she had nothing else to do. She grew bored and soon ceased to be aware of what she was doing, but from time to time she murmured to herself: “The thirtieth. Tomorrow is the thirty-first.”
The words “She hasn't been outside for three days” reached her from the corridor, snatching her out of her daydreams. She observed how far her aimless work had taken herâall the way to the day of Mary's Sacrifice. Her mother touched her hand. “Zhenya, I ask you, please tell me ...”
She didn't hear what followed, as if it hadn't been said. As if in a dream, Zhenya interrupted her mother, and asked her to say, “The decapitation of John the Baptist.”
Her mother repeated these words uncomprehendingly. She didn't say “Battist.” It was Aksinya who said that.
The next moment Zhenya was wondering about herself. What was it? Who had driven her to it? Where did it come from? Had she, Zhenya, asked this? How could she think that Mamaâhow fantastic and improbable! Who had invented all this?
Her mother was still standing there, not trusting her ears. She stared at Zhenya with large eyes. This outburst embarrassed her. This request sounded as if Zhenya wanted to make fun of her. But there were tears in her daughter's eyes.
7
Her dark foreboding came true. On the pleasure ride she noticed clearly that the air was growing milder and that the rattling of the hoofs sounded muffled. Even before she had lit the carriage lamps, dry flakes whirled through the air. They weren't over the bridge before the individual flakes vanished and the snow fell as a thick, closely packed mass. Davlecha climbed down from the driver's seat and put up the leather hood. For Zhenya and Seryozha it became dark and cavern-like. They would have liked to rage like the wild storm. They only noticed that Davlecha was driving home because they again heard the bridge under Vykormish's hoofs. The roads could no longer be recognizedâthey were gone. The night closed in suddenly, the town looked like a crazy thing, moving countless thick, pale lips. Seryozha knelt on the seat, leaned out of the carriage and ordered the coachman to drive to the vocational school. Zhenya was lost in rapture when the secrets and charm of winter came to her with the echo of Seryozha's words through the muffled air. Davlecha shouted back at him that they had to return home so as not to exhaust the horse; the master and mistress were going to the theater and the horses must be harnessed to the sleigh. This reminded Zhenya that her parents were going out tonight and they would be left alone in the house. She decided to sit cozily by the lamp till late into the night reading
Tales of Murr the Tomcat
, which were not intended for children. She would sneak the book out of Mama's bedroom. And chocolateâshe would read and eat chocolate, while listening to the howl of the wind through the streets.
The snowstorm was already very intense. The sky shook, and white kingdoms and countries fellânumberâ less, secret and terrible. Nobody knew where they came from and it was clear that they had never in their lives heard of earth. These blind, midnight countries would cover the earth, without seeing it or knowing it. There was a terrible intoxication about these kingdoms, a devilish fascination. Thinking about them, Zhenya swallowed the wrong way and choked for a moment. The swirling air shook everything in its path, and in the far, far distance the fields howled mournfully, as if they were being whipped. Everything was confused. The night threw itself upon the fields, raging through its tangled gray hair, which she cut down and blinded. Everybody out riding shouted that the road could no longer be recognized. Shouts and echoes vanished without meeting and died away, lifted above different roofs by the rampaging wind. The snowstorm.
In the corridor they stamped their feet a long time and shook the snow out of their white, ruffled furs. And how much water flowed from their rubbers onto the checkered linoleum! Eggshells lay on the table, the pepper box had been taken from its stand and not replaced, and pepper lay sprinkled over the tablecloth, the spilled yolks and an opened tin of sardines. Their parents had already eaten their evening meal, but they were still sitting in the dining room and urged the children, who had turned up late, to hurry. They did not scold them, for they themselves had eaten earlier than usual because they were going to the theater. Their mother was uncertain whether she wanted to go or not, and sat there looking depressed. Looking at her, Zhenya realized that she herself was anything but happy.
Finally she opened the silly but rather sad book, and came back into the dining room to ask where the nutcake was. Her father looked at her mother and said nobody was forcing them to go and that they would probably do better to stay home.
“No, of course we'll go,” said her mother. “I must have diversion, the doctor said so.”
“Well, let's make a decision.”
“Where is the nutcake?” Zhenya asked for the second time and was told that she ought to eat something else firstâone didn't start with nutcake. However, it was in the cupboard. As if Zhenya were a stranger in the house and didn't know family habits, added her father. Then he turned to her mother and repeated, “Let's make a decision.”
“I have decided. We're going.” Her mother smiled sadly at Zhenya and went out to dress. Seryozha broke his egg with a spoon. Hastily, like a very busy man, he reminded his father that the weather was rough, that there was a snowstorm, he should remember that; then he laughed. Something embarrassing was happening to his thawed-out nose. He wriggled in his chair and pulled a handkerchief out of his school uniform pants. He blew his nose the way his father had taught himâ“without hurting your eardrums”âand said, “We saw Negarat's friend on our way.”
“Evans?” the father asked absent-mindedly.
“We don't know that man,” Zhenya put in heatedly.
“Vika!” called a voice from the bedroom. Their father got up and went out.
At the door Zhenya collided with Ulyasha, who was carrying a lighted lamp. Soon afterward she heard a door closing nearby. That would be Seryozha going to his room. Today he had surpassed himselfâhis sister liked it when the Akhmedianovs' friend behaved like a real schoolboy, when it could be said of him that he was wearing a school
uniform
.
Doors opened and shut. Rubbers stamped out. Finally, the master and mistress were gone... .
The letter said she had never been touchy, and “if you want something, ask for it, as before,” and when the “dear sister,” laden with greetings and good wishes, had distinguished her from her numerous relatives, Ulyasha, who was called “Juliana” in the letter, thanked the young lady, turned down the lamp, took the letter, the ink bottle and the rest of the greasy paper and went out.
Zhenya returned to her homework. She kept on dividing the number and put down one dividend after the other. There was no end in sight. The fraction in the quotient rose and rose.
“Suddenly the measles return,” went through her head. “Today Dikikh said nothing about the infinite.” She felt that she had felt this way earlier todayâshe'd rather have slept or criedâbut she didn't recall what it was about or when it happened for she couldn't think clearly any more. The howling outside the window was dying down. The snowstorm was gradually tapering off. Decimal fractions were something quite new to her. There was not enough room on the right. She decided to start again at the beginning, to write smaller, and this time check every term. The street became quiet once again. She was afraid she had forgotten the number she had “borrowed” from the next number and she couldn't keep the product in her head. “The window won't run away,” she thought and cast threes and sevens into the bottomless quotient. “I will hear them in time. It's quiet now. They won't come in that quickly. They are wearing their furs and Mama is pregnant. I have it nowâ3773 is repeated. One can either copy it or cross it out.” Suddenly she remembered what Dikikh had told her today: “You needn't keep them, you can simply leave them out.”
She got up and went to the window. It had cleared. Separate snowflakes sailed out of the black night. They glided toward the street lamp, swam around it and disappeared, to be replaced by others. The streets glittered, a carpet of snow for a sleigh ride. The carpet was white, radiant and sweet like the gingerbread in the story. Zhenya stood at the window and studied the circles and figures that Andersen's silver snowflakes formed around the lamp. She stood there for quite a while and then went to Mama's room to get
Murr the Tomcat.
She entered without light. One could see without it, for the coachhouse roof threw a reflected brilliance into the room. Beneath the high ceiling the beds froze and glittered. The smoke-gray silk lay where it had been carelessly thrown. The small blouses gave out an oppressive odor of armpits and calico. There was a smell of violets, and the cupboard was blue-black like the night outside and like the dry, warm darkness in which this frozen brilliance moved. A brass knob on the bed shimmered like a lonely pearl. Another one was extinguished by a sheet thrown over it. Zhenya squeezed her eyes together; the brass knob separated itself from the bed and swam to the wardrobe. Then she remembered why she had come. With book in hand, she walked to one of the windows. The night was star-bright. Winter had come to Yekaterinburg. She looked down into the yard and thought of Pushkin. She decided to ask her tutor to assign her an essay on
Eugene Onegin.
Seryozha tried to gossip with her. He asked, “Did you put on perfume? Give me some, too.” He had been nice all day, so rosy-cheeked, but she thought an evening like this might never come again and she wanted to enjoy it alone.
Zhenya returned to her room and started on the
Tales.
She read one and started another. She was so absorbed she didn't hear her brother going to bed in the room next door. A strange game took possession of her face, quite without her knowing it. Her face twisted sideways, like a fish; she pouted her lower lip; and her pupils, glued rigidly to the book as if by a spell, refused to look up, for they were afraid to find
it
behind the chest of drawers. Then she suddenly nodded to the lines as if she gave them her assentâjust as one gives approval to a deed and is pleased about the way things have turned out. She read more slowly when she reached the descriptions of the lakes and threw herself head over heels into the night scenes illuminated with Bengal lights. In one passage, a man who got lost shouted, waited for an answer and heard only the echo of his own voice. She suppressed a cry and had to cough. The un-Russian name “Myra” freed her from her spell. She put the book aside and thought: “So this is winter in Asia. What do the Chinese do on such a dark night?” Her eyes fell on the clock. It must be a terrible feeling to be in this darkness with Chinese. She looked at the clock again and became alarmed. Her parents might come back at any minute. It was nearly twelve. She laced up her shoes and hurried to return the book to its place.
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Zhenya sat up in bed with wide-open eyes. No, it couldn't be a thiefâthere were many people. They stamped through the house and talked as loud as in daylight. Suddenly somebody cried out as if he were being murdered, something was dragged along the floor, chairs were overturned. It was a woman's cry. Slowly Zhenya recognized the voices, every one except that of the woman. An incredible running back and forth began. Doors banged. Then a distant door shut, followed by a stifled cry, as if somebody had stuffed something into the woman's mouth. But the door opened again, and a searing, scourging whine shuddered through the house. Zhenya's hair stood on end: the woman was her mother; she had
done
it. Ulyasha was wailing. She also heard the voice of her father, but only once and not again. She heard Seryozha being pushed into a room, and he roared, “Don't you dare to lock me up!” Then, just as she was, barefoot, wearing only her nightgown, she dashed into the corridor, almost colliding with her father. He was wearing his overcoat and shouted something to Ulyasha as he ran. “Papa!” She saw that he was running from the bathroom with a jug of water. “Papa!”
“Where is Lipa?” he shouted in a totally unfamiliar voice. He spilled water on the floor and disappeared through a door. When he came out again a moment later, in his shirt sleeves and without his waistcoat, Zhenya found herself in Ulyasha's arms and didn't hear his words, uttered in a desperate, heart-rending whisper.
“What's wrong with Mama?”
Instead of a reply Ulyasha repeated over and over, “No, no. It cannot be. Zhenya dear, go to sleep, cover yourself up, turn over and lie on your side. A-ah, God! No, no, dear!” she repeated, covered Zhenya up like a small child and went out. It cannot be, but she didn't say
what
could not be, and her face had been wet and her hair disarrayed. Three doors away, a lock clicked behind her.
Zhenya lit a match to see whether it would soon be dawn. It was only one o'clock. She was astonished. Had she really slept only one hour? The hubbub in her parents' room continued. A loud groaning rose and fell. Then, for a moment, an endless, eternal silence. Hurried footsteps and muffled voices broke the silence. A bell rang once, then again. Then words, arguments, ordersâso many that it sounded as if the rooms were lit by voices, as a table is lighted by a thousand fading candelabra.
Zhenya fell asleep. She slept with tears in her eyes. She dreamed that there were visitors. She counted them but always miscalculated. Every time there was one person too many. And every time the same horror seized her when she recognized that the extra person wasn't just anybody: it was Mama.
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One couldn't help it, one had to feel happy about the small, sunny morning. Seryozha thought of games in the yard, of snowballs, of snowfights with the neighbors' children. Tea was brought to them in the schoolroom, and they were told that there were floor polishers in the dining room. Their father came in. It was soon clear that he knew nothing about floor polishers. He really knew nothing about them. He told them the true reason for the changes in their routine. Their mother was ill. She needed quiet. Ravens flew, with far-echoing caws, over the street, shrouded in white. A small sleigh glided by, pushing its horse forward. The animal was not yet used to the new harness and kept losing the beat.
“You'll go to the Defendovs. I've arranged everything. And you, Seryozhaâ”
“Why?” Zhenya interrupted.
But Seryozha had guessed why and forestalled his father. “So that you don't catch the infection,” he instructed his sister. But the street outside made him restless. He ran to the window as if someone had called to him. The Tartar who came out of the house in his new clothes looked as stately and as highly adorned as a pheasant. He wore a lambskin cap, and his bare sheepskin coat had a sheen warmer than morocco leather. He waddled and rocked slightly, probably because the raspberry-red pattern on his white boots ignored the natural structure of the human foot. These patterns moved arbitrarily; they cared little whether the objects beneath them were feet, teacups or roof tiles. But the most interesting thing of allâat this moment, the weak groaning that came from the bedroom grew louder and their father went into the corridor, forbidding them to follow himâthe most interesting thing of all was the tracks he left on the smooth snow with his sharp, narrow boot tips. These tracks, looking as if they had been carved, made the snow appear even whiter and silkier.