But there was no time for thinking. It was beginning to get dark outside. He had to do many things while there was still light. Not the least concern was familiarizing himself with the decrees posted in the street. This was a serious time. Out of ignorance, you could pay with your life for violating some mandatory decree. And not opening the apartment and not taking the sack from his weary shoulder, he went down and outside and approached the wall pasted all over with printed matter.
3
This printed matter consisted of newspaper articles, the records of speeches at meetings, and decrees. Yuri Andreevich glanced cursorily at the titles. “On the Rules of the Requisition and Taxation of the Propertied Classes.” “On Workers’ Control.” “On Factory Committees.” These were the instructions of the new power that had come to the town to abolish the preceding order found there. They were a reminder of the immutability of its foundations, perhaps forgotten by the inhabitants during the temporary rule of the Whites. But Yuri Andreevich’s head began to spin from the endlessness of these monotonous repetitions. What year did these headlines belong to? The time of the first upheaval, or a later period, after some intervening rebellions of the Whites? What were these inscriptions? From last year? The year before last? At one time in his life he had admired the unconditional quality of this language and the directness of this thinking. Could it be that he had to pay for this imprudent admiration by never seeing anything else in his life but these frenzied cries and demands, unchanging in the course of long years, becoming ever more impractical, incomprehensible, and unfeasible? Could it be that for a moment of too-broad sympathy he had enslaved himself forever?
He came upon a fragment from some report. He read:
“Information about famine testifies to the incredible inactivity of the local organizations. The facts of abuse are obvious, the speculation is monstrous, but what has been done by the bureau of the local trade union leaders, what has been done by the heads of municipal and regional factory committees? Unless we conduct massive searches in the warehouses of the Yuriatin freight station and along the Yuriatin–Razvilye and Razvilye–Rybalka lines, unless we take severe measures of terror, down to shooting speculators on the spot, there will be no escape from famine.”
“What enviable blindness!” thought the doctor. “What bread are they talking about, when there has long been none in nature? What propertied classes, what speculators, when they’ve long been abolished by the sense of previous decrees? What peasants, what villages, if they no longer exist? What obliviousness to their own designs and measures, which have long left no stone upon stone in life! What must one be, to rave year after year with delirious feverishness about nonexistent, long-extinct themes, and to know nothing, to see nothing around one!”
The doctor’s head was spinning. He fainted and fell unconscious on the sidewalk. When he came to his senses, people helped him to get up and offered to take him wherever he indicated. He thanked them and declined the help, explaining that he only had to go across the street.
4
He went up the stairs again and started opening the door to Lara’s apartment. It was still quite light on the landing, not a bit darker than when he had first gone up. He noted with grateful joy that the sun was not hurrying him.
The click of the unlocking door caused turmoil inside. The space left empty in the absence of people met him with the clanging and rattling of overturned and falling tin cans. Rats fell smack on the floor and scattered in all directions. The doctor felt ill at ease from a sense of helplessness before these loathsome creatures, which probably bred here by the thousand.
And before making any attempt to settle down for the night, he decided first of all to protect himself from this pestilence, and, finding some easily isolated and tightly closing door, to stop all the rat holes with broken glass and scraps of sheet metal.
From the front hall he turned left, to a part of the apartment unknown to him. Passing through a dark room, he found himself in a bright one, with two windows giving onto the street. Just opposite the windows, on the other side, the house with figures stood darkly. The lower part of its wall was pasted over with newspapers. Their backs to the windows, passersby stood reading the newspapers.
The light in the room and outside was one and the same, the young, unseasoned evening light of early spring. The commonality of the light inside and outside was so great that it was as if there were no separation between the room and the street. Only in one thing was there a slight difference. In Lara’s bedroom, where Yuri Andreevich was standing, it was colder than outside on Kupecheskaya.
When Yuri Andreevich was nearing town during his last march, and was walking through it an hour or two earlier, the immense increase of his weakness had seemed to him the sign of an imminently threatening illness, and it had frightened him.
Now the uniformity of light in the house and in the open delighted him for no reason. The column of cold air, one and the same outside and inside, made him akin to the passersby in the evening street, to the moods of the town, to life in the world. His fears went away. He no longer thought he would fall ill. The evening transparency of the all-pervading spring light seemed to him a pledge of distant and generous hopes. He believed that everything was for the better, that he would achieve everything in life, would find and reconcile everybody, would think everything through and express it. And he waited for the joy of seeing Lara as for the nearest proof.
Mad excitement and unbridled restlessness replaced his previously failing strength. This animation was a surer symptom of beginning illness than the recent weakness. Yuri Andreevich could not stay put. He was again drawn outside, and here is the reason why.
Before settling himself in here, he wanted to have his hair cut and his beard shaved. With that in mind, he looked into the windows of the former barbershops as he went through the city. Some of them were empty or occupied by other businesses. Others, which corresponded to their former purpose, were under lock and key. There was nowhere for him to have a shave and a haircut. Yuri Andreevich had no razor of his own. Scissors, if he could find Lara’s, might help him out of his difficulty. But, rummaging through everything in her dressing table with nervous haste, he did not find any scissors.
He remembered that there had once been a sewing shop on Malaya Spasskaya. He thought that, if the establishment had not ceased to exist and still went on working, and if he managed to get there before they closed, he could ask one of the seamstresses for scissors. And he went out again.
5
His memory had not deceived him. The shop was still in its former place; the work went on. The shop occupied a commercial space on the ground floor, with a window running the whole width of it and an entrance from the street. Through the window one could see inside to the opposite wall. The seamstresses worked in full view of the passersby.
The room was terribly crowded. In addition to the actual workers, some amateur seamstresses, aging ladies from Yuriatin society, had probably gotten places in order to obtain the work booklets spoken of in the decree on the wall of the house with figures.
Their movements could be distinguished at once from the efficiency of the real seamstresses. The shop worked only for the army, making padded trousers, quilted coats and jackets, and such clownish-looking overcoats as Yuri Andreevich had already seen in the partisan camp, tacked together from dog pelts of different colors. The clumsy fingers of the amateur seamstresses had a hard time doing the unaccustomed near-furrier’s work, as they put the edges turned back for hemming under the needles of the sewing machines.