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.