“My nephew was drawn to the people from childhood. He grew up near his father, among the workers at the Mighty Sviatogor. The Varykino factories, maybe you’ve heard of them? Ah, what are we doing, the two of us! I’m a forgetful fool! Half the chin’s smooth, the other half unshaven. I’m talking away. And what are you doing, not stopping me? The soap on your face has dried up. I’ll go and heat some water. It’s grown cold.”
When Tuntseva came back, Yuri Andreevich asked:
“Varykino—it’s some sort of blessed backwoods, a wild place, where no shocks ever reach?”
“Well, ‘blessed,’ so to speak. That wild place got into maybe a worse pickle than we did. Some bands of men passed through Varykino, no one knows who. They didn’t speak our language. They went from house to house, taking people out and shooting them. And then left without a word. The bodies just stayed there unattended on the snow. It happened in the winter. Why do you keep jumping all the time? I almost cut your throat with the razor.”
“But you said your brother-in-law lived in Varykino. Did he, too, suffer from these horrors?”
“No, why? God is merciful. He and his wife got out of there in time. The new wife, the second one. Where they are, nobody knows, but it’s certain they’re safe. Recently there were new people there. A Moscow family, visitors. They left even earlier. The younger man, a doctor, the head of the family, disappeared without a trace. Well, what does it mean, ‘without a trace’? It’s just a way of speaking, that it was without a trace, so as not to get upset. But in reality we’ve got to assume he’s dead, killed. They searched and searched, but didn’t find him. Meanwhile the other man, the older one, was called home. He’s a professor. Of agronomy. I heard he got a summons from the government. They passed through Yuriatin before the Whites came for the second time. You’re up to it again, dear comrade? If you fidget and jump like that under the razor, it won’t be long before the client’s throat is cut. You ask too much from a barber.”
“So they’re in Moscow!”
7
“In Moscow! In Moscow!” echoed in his soul with every step, as he went up the cast-iron stairs for the third time. The empty apartment met him again with an uproar of leaping, tumbling, scattering rats. It was clear to Yuri Andreevich that he would not get a wink of sleep next to these vermin, however worn out he was. He began his preparations for the night by stopping up the rat holes. Fortunately, there were not so many of them in the bedroom, far less than in the rest of the apartment, where the floors and baseboards were in less good condition. But he had to hurry. Night was falling. True, there waited for him on the kitchen table, perhaps in expectation of his coming, a lamp taken down from the wall and half filled, and, next to it in an open matchbox, several matches, ten in number, as Yuri Andreevich counted. But the one and the other, the kerosene and the matches, he had better use sparingly. In the bedroom he also discovered a night lamp—a bowl with a wick and some traces of lamp oil, which the rats had probably drunk almost to the bottom.
In some places, the edges of the baseboards had come away from the floor. Yuri Andreevich filled the cracks with several layers of broken glass, the sharp ends pointing inwards. The bedroom door fitted well to the doorstep. It could be closed tightly and, when shut, totally separated the room with the stopped-up holes from the rest of the apartment. In a little more than an hour, Yuri Andreevich managed to do it all.
A tile stove cut off one corner of the bedroom, with a tile cornice that did not reach the ceiling. In the kitchen there was a supply of firewood, about ten bundles. Yuri Andreevich decided to rob Lara of a couple of armloads, and going on one knee, he began to pile the wood on his left arm. He brought it to the bedroom, set it down by the stove, familiarized himself with its mechanism, and quickly checked the condition it was in. He wanted to lock the door, but the lock turned out to be in disrepair, and therefore, tucking in some paper to make it tight and keep it from opening, Yuri Andreevich unhurriedly began making a fire in the stove.
While putting wood into the firebox, he saw a mark on the butt end of one of the logs. He recognized it with surprise. It was the trace of an old brand mark, the two initial letters K and D, which indicated what warehouse the logs came from before they were cut up. Long ago, when Krüger was still there, they had branded with these letters the ends of logs from the Kulabyshev plot in Varykino, when the factory sold off its extra unneeded fuel supplies.
The presence of this sort of firewood in Lara’s household proved that she knew Samdevyatov and that he looked after her, just as he had once supplied all the needs of the doctor and his family. This discovery was a knife in the doctor’s heart. He had been burdened by Anfim Efimovich’s help even before. Now the embarrassment of these favors was complicated by other feelings.
It was unlikely that Anfim was Larissa Fyodorovna’s benefactor just for the beauty of it. Yuri Andreevich pictured Anfim Efimovich’s free and easy ways and Lara’s recklessness as a woman. It could not be that there was nothing between them.
In the stove the dry Kulabyshev wood was beginning to burn furiously, with a concerted crackling, and as it caught fire, Yuri Andreevich’s jealous blindness, having started from weak suppositions, arrived at complete certainty.
But his soul was tormented on all sides, and one pain came to replace another. He had no need to drive these suspicions away. His thoughts, without effort, of themselves, jumped from subject to subject. Reflections about his family, rushing upon him with renewed force, overshadowed his jealous fits for a time.
“So you’re in Moscow, my dear ones?” It already seemed to him that Tuntseva had certified their safe arrival for him. “Meaning that you repeated that long, difficult trip without me? How was the journey? What sort of business was Alexander Alexandrovich summoned for? Probably an invitation from the Academy to start teaching there again? What did you find at home? Come now, you don’t mean that home still exists? Oh, Lord, how difficult and painful! Oh, don’t think, don’t think! How confused my thoughts are! What’s wrong with me, Tonya? I seem to be falling ill. What will become of me and of you all, Tonya, Tonechka, Tonya, Shurochka, Alexander Alexandrovich? O Light that never sets, why hast Thou rejected me from Thy presence?1 Why are you borne away from me all my life? Why are we always apart? But we’ll soon be united, we’ll come together, right? I’ll reach you on foot, if it can’t be otherwise. We’ll see each other. Everything will go well again, right?
“But how can the earth not swallow me up, if I keep forgetting that Tonya was supposed to give birth and probably did give birth? It’s not the first time that I’ve shown this forgetfulness. How did her delivery go? How did she give birth? They stopped in Yuriatin on their way to Moscow. True, Lara doesn’t know them, but still this seamstress and hairdresser, a total stranger, wasn’t ignorant of their fate, yet Lara doesn’t say a word about them in her note. What strange inattention, smacking of indifference! As inexplicable as passing over in silence her relations with Samdevyatov.”
Here Yuri Andreevich looked around at the walls of the bedroom with a different, discerning eye. He knew that, of the things standing or hanging around him, not one belonged to Lara, and that the furnishings of the former owners, unknown and in hiding, in no way testified to Lara’s taste.
But all the same, be that as it may, he suddenly felt ill at ease among the men and women in enlarged photographs gazing from the walls. A spirit of hostility breathed on him from the crude furnishings. He felt himself foreign and superfluous in this bedroom.