“Here's a letter. You'll give it to Mr. Defendov. Personally. Do you understand? Now get dressed. You'll be taken there immediately. Go to the rear entrance. Seryozha, the Akhmedianovs are expecting you.”
“Really?” the boy asked rather mockingly.
“Yes. Get dressed in the kitchen!”
Their father spoke distractedly and accompanied them slowly to the kitchen, where their furs, caps and mittens were heaped like a small mountain on a stool. The winter air blew in from the stairs. “Ah-yoch!” The frozen call of flying sleighs hung in the air. Since they were in a hurry, they missed their coat sleeves once or twice. Their clothes smelled of closets and sleepy fur.
“What are you doing? Don't put it on the edge of the table or it will fall off. Well, how are things?”
“She's still groaning.” The chambermaid lifted her apron, leaned down and threw some small logs into the flames of the rumbling kitchen stove. “That's not my affair,” she said with annoyance and went out of the room.
In a dented black pail lay yellowed prescriptions and broken glass. The towels were soaked with fresh as well a clotted blood. They seemed to blaze, as if they could be trod out like flaring embers. Only water boiled in the pots. Everywhere stood white crucibles and mortars of unusual shape, as in a drugstore. Little Halim was breaking up ice blocks in the hallway.
“Is there much left from the summer?” asked Seryozha.
“We'll soon have new ice.”
“Here, give it to me. You're not doing it right.”
“What do you mean, not right? I have to break it into little pieces. For the bottles.”
“Well, are you through?”
While Zhenya ran once more through the rooms, Seryozha went out onto the steps and beat the icy railings with a stick of wood, waiting for his sister.
8
The Defendovs were eating their evening meal. The grandmother crossed herself and sank back into her armchair. The lamp shone dimly and was unsteady. Sometimes it was turned up too high, sometimes too low. Defendov often reached out his hand to the screw; he drew it back slowly, sat back on his seat and his hand shook, not like the hand of an old man, but more as if he were raising a glass of spirits poured too full. His fingertips shook. He spoke in a clear, steady voice, as if he put his words together not with sounds but with individual letters. And he pronounced them all, even the final consonants.
The swollen neck of the lamp glowed, outlined with geranium and heliotrope tendrils. The cockroaches ran toward the warm glass, and the clock hands advanced cautiously. Time crept as it does in winter. In the room it festered; outside it congealed with a bad smell. Behind the windows, it hurried, doubled and tripled itself in the lights.
Mrs. Defendov put roast liver on the table. The soup, spiced only with onions, steamed fragrantly. Defendov talked continuously, often repeating the words “I recommend,” but Zhenya heard nothing... . Even yesterday she had felt like crying. Now she thirsted for tears as she sat in the little jacket sewed according to her mother's instructions.
Defendov noticed how things were with her. He tried to distract her. Now he spoke to her as to a small child, then he fell into the opposite extreme. His joking questions frightened and confused her. He blindly fingered the soul of his daughter's friend, as if he were asking her heart its age. After he had detected one of Zhenya's characteristic traits, he tried to behave in conformity with it and thus help the child to stop thinking about home. But this only reminded her even more that she was among strangers.
Suddenly she could stand it no longer, got up and murmured with childish embarrassment, “Thank you. I've really eaten enough. May I look at the pictures?” Everybody looked startled and she blushed, then nodded toward the adjoining room and added, “Walter Scott. May I?”
“Go, go, my dear,” said the grandmother, and with a frown at the others made them keep their peace. “The poor child,” she said to her son when the claret-colored curtain closed behind Zhenya.
The grim completeness of the set of magazines,
The North
, lay so heavy upon the bookshelf that it leaned to one side, and the velvety crimson underneath had a golden luster. A pink lamp hung from the ceiling and cast no light on either of the much-rubbed armchairs. The little carpet, buried in darkness, was a surprise to the feet.
Zhenya had wanted to come into the room, sit down and cry. Tears entered her eyes but her sorrow failed to overflow. How could she shake off this sorrow, which had lain upon her like a beam since yesterday? Tears had no power over it, they could not open the sluice gates. To help them along, she tried to think about her mother.
Preparing to spend a night with strangers, she realized for the first time the depths of her attachment to this dearest and most beloved human being on earth.
Suddenly she heard Lisa's laugh behind the curtain. “Oh, you fidget, oh, you little Lisa devil,” said the grandmother, coughing between her words. Zhenya wondered how she could ever have imagined that she loved this girl; her laughter sounded in the very next room, yet it was distant and useless to Zhenya. And then something turned over within her and let the tears break loose when she thought of her mother, suffering, standing among an endless row of yesterdays, as if among a crowd of people who had come to say good-by on a railway platform and remained behind when the train carried Zhenya away.
But what was really insupportable was the penetrating look Mrs. Luvers had thrown at her yesterday in the schoolroom. It had buried itself in her memory, and would now never leave her. It was an object that must be accepted, something of value to her that she had forgotten and neglected.
The wild, delirious bitterness and the utter endlessness of this feeling were so confusing that she felt she might lose her reason over it. Zhenya stood at the window and wept violently. Her tears flowed and she did not wipe them away; her hands moved, yet they grasped nothing. They reached out, clutching spasmodically, desperately and willfully.
Suddenly a thought came to herâthat she was
terrifyingly
like her mother. She had the feeling with a vividness and certainty which seemed to have the power to turn the thought into reality and, through the very force of this shockingly swift conviction, make her indeed like her mother. This feeling was so sharp and penetrating that she groaned involuntarily. It was the recognition of a woman who is given the power to contemplate her external loveliness from within. Zhenya couldn't account for it to herself. It was the first time she had ever experienced anything like it. In only one particular she was not mistaken: Mrs. Luvers had once stood by a window in the same state of excitement, turned away from her daughter and her daughter's governess; she had bitten her lip and the gloved hand that clutched a pair of opera glasses.
In a stupor from weeping, but with a happy face, Zhenya went back to the Defendovs. Her walk had changed; now it was broad, dreamy and new. When Defendov saw her walk in, he realized that the picture of her that he had formed in her absence was quite inaccurate. He would have proceeded to draw another one had not the samovar interfered.
Mrs. Defendov fetched a tray from the kitchen and placed the samovar on the floor. All eyes were turned toward the wheezing copper machine, as if it were alive. Its capricious behavior was tamed when it stood at last on the table. Zhenya sat down on her chair. She decided to enter the conversation, and felt dimly that the choice of a topic was up to her. Otherwise, the others would once more leave her in her perilous solitude and not realize that her mother was present here, through her and in her. This shortsightedness on their part would hurtâand, most of all, it would hurt Mama. She addressed Mrs. Defendov, who with some difficulty was adjusting the samovar at the edge of the table: “Vassa Vassilievna ...”
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“Can you have a child?”
Lisa did not answer Zhenya at once. “Quiet, don't speak so loud. Naturally, all girls can.” She spoke incoherently and in a whisper. Zhenya couldn't see her friend's face, for Lisa was looking for matches on the table and not finding any.
She knew much more about it than Zhenya; she knew
everything,
the way children know who have picked it up from the conversation of strangers. Natures whom the Creator loves rebel in such cases. They revolt and are gripped by a wild timidity. They cannot have this experience without certain pathological impulses. The opposite would hardly be considered natural: juvenile insanity bears today the seal of normality.
Somebody had once told Lisa all kinds of vulgar and filthy things in a dark corner. They didn't shock her when she heard them, and she had carried them about ever since, not forgetting one bit of the dirt that had been revealed to her. She knew it all. Her body was not surprised, her heart made no protest, her soul inflicted no punishment upon her brain because it had dared to find out without consulting her heart about things that didn't come from the soul.
“I know that.” (“You know nothing,” thought Lisa.) “I know that,” Zhenya repeated. “I'm not asking about that. But whether one feelsâyou take a step and suddenly you have a childâwell ...”
“Come on,” said Lisa hoarsely, repressing her laughter. “How can you yell so loud? They'll hear you!”
The conversation took place in Lisa's room. Lisa spoke so quietly that one could hear the drip from the washstand. She had found the matches, but hesitated before lighting the lamp, because she couldn't force a serious expression on her face, which was twisted into a grin. She didn't want to hurt her friend. She indulged Zhenya's ignorance because she had no idea that one could talk about these things other than in words that couldn't be used here in her home, to a friend who didn't go to school. She lit the lamp. Fortunately the pan had run over and Lisa bent down to wipe up the floor, and so she was able to conceal a new fit of laughter with her apron and the slapping of the cleaning rag. Suddenly she burst into uncontrollable laughter, for she had found a pretext: her comb had fallen into the pan.
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During those days Zhenya thought of nothing but her family and waited for the hour when she would be taken home. In the morning, after Lisa had gone to high school, Zhenya dressed and went out alone.
The life of the suburb was not like life in the part of the city where she lived. Most of the day it was empty and boring here. There was nothing to please the eye. Everything one saw was good for nothing, except maybe a birch broom or a stove mop. Black slop water flowed into the street, froze instantly and turned white. At certain hours the street was crowded with very simple people. Workers crawled over the snow like cockroaches. The doors of the tea houses flew open, and waves of soap fumes rolled out, as from a laundryâas if it had turned warmer, as if spring had come, when young men ran bent over through the streets with their trousers tucked into felt boots. The pigeons had no fear of all these people. They flew back and forth above the streets, seeking food. Were any millet, oats or droppings sprinkled over the snow? A pie seller's stand gleamed in fat and warmth. This glow and warmth entered the mouths that had been scoured with cheap rotgut. The fat burned their gullets. And on the way down, some of it escaped their wheezing lungs. Was it maybe this that warmed the street?
Just as suddenly the street would become empty. Empty peasant sledges drove by, broad flat sledges with bearded men. They were sunk into their furs, which hugged their shoulders like clumsy bears. The sledges left behind sad wisps of hay and the sweet, slow-fading sound of distant sleigh-bells. The merchants disappeared at the turning behind a row of young birches, which from a distance looked like a long picket fence.
Crows came here that had flown croaking over the Luvers' house. But here they did not croak. They only let out a cry, beat their wings and perched on fences, until suddenly, as if by a sign, they flew to the trees and sat nudging one another on the bare branches. Then one feels, how late it is, how late it is in the whole wide world. So late no watch can tell the time.
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Toward the end of the second week, on a Thursday, she saw him again quite early in the morning. Lisa's bed was empty. When Zhenya woke up, she heard the garden gate click shut behind her. She got up and went to the window without making a light. It was still quite dark. In the sky, in the branches of the trees and in the movements of the dogs there seemed to be the same oppressive heaviness as yesterday. This dismal weather had now lasted three days and there seemed no force that could lift it from the softening snow, as one lifts a cast-iron kettle from a rough shelf.
In the window opposite, a lamp was burning. Two bright bands of light fell beneath a horse and struck his shaggy fetlocks. Shadows glided over the snow, and then the sleeves of a ghost crossed his fur-covered arms, cast by the light flickering behind the curtain. The horse stood motionless, dreaming.
Then she saw him. She recognized him immediately from his silhouette in the window. The lame man lifted up the lamp and went out with it. The two bands of light moved behind him, became shorter, then lengthened.
The sleighs flashed into motion and even more suddenly stormed off into the darkness, as if they had gone to the steps in the rear of the house.
Strange that Tsvetkov should find her here in the suburb.
Soon the lamp reappeared and the light slid across the curtains; it began to move back again, until suddenly it came to a halt behind the curtain on the window sill, from which he had taken it.
That was on Thursday. And on Friday they finally came to take her home.