Meanwhile a mute scene was taking place between the girl and the man. They did not say a word to each other and only exchanged glances. But their mutual understanding was frighteningly magical, as if he were a puppeteer and she a puppet, obedient to the movements of his hand.
The weary smile that appeared on her face made the girl half close her eyes and half open her lips. But to the man’s mocking glances she responded with the sly winking of an accomplice. Both were pleased that everything had turned out so well, the secret had not been discovered, and the woman who poisoned herself had remained alive.
Yura devoured them both with his eyes. From the semi-darkness, where no one could see him, he looked into the circle of lamplight, unable to tear himself away. The spectacle of the girl’s enslavement was inscrutably mysterious and shamelessly candid. Contradictory feelings crowded in his breast. Yura’s heart was wrung by their as yet untried power.
This was the very thing he had so ardently yammered about for a year with Misha and Tonya under the meaningless name of vulgarity, that frightening and alluring thing which they had dealt with so easily at a safe distance in words, and here was that force before Yura’s eyes, thoroughly tangible and dim and dreamlike, pitilessly destructive and pitiful and calling for help, and where was their childish philosophy, and what was Yura to do now?
“Do you know who that man is?” Misha asked when they went outside. Yura was immersed in his thoughts and did not answer.
“It’s the same one who got your father to drink and destroyed him. Remember, on the train? I told you about it.”
Yura was thinking about the girl and the future, and not about his father and the past. For the first moment he did not even understand what Misha was telling him. It was hard to talk in the cold.
“Frozen, Semyon?” asked Alexander Alexandrovich.
They drove off.
*Quite carried away.
Part Three
THE CHRISTMAS PARTY AT THE SVENTITSKYS’
1
Once in the winter Alexander Alexandrovich gave Anna Ivanovna an antique wardrobe. He had bought it by chance. The ebony wardrobe was of enormous proportions. It would not go through any doorway in one piece. It was delivered dismantled, brought into the house in sections, and they began thinking where to put it. It would not do in the downstairs rooms, where there was space enough, because its purpose was unsuitable, and it could not be put upstairs for lack of room. Part of the upper landing of the inside stairway was cleared for the wardrobe, by the door to the master bedroom.
The yard porter Markel came to put the wardrobe together. He brought along his six-year-old daughter Marinka. Marinka was given a stick of barley sugar. Marinka snuffed her nose and, licking the candy and her slobbery fingers, watched frowningly as her father worked.
For a while everything went smoothly. The wardrobe gradually grew before Anna Ivanovna’s eyes. Suddenly, when it only remained to attach the top, she decided to help Markel. She stood on the high bottom of the wardrobe and, tottering, bumped against the side, which was held together only by a mortise and tenon. The slipknot Markel had tied temporarily to hold the side came undone. Together with the boards that went crashing to the floor, Anna Ivanovna also fell on her back and hurt herself badly.
“Eh, dear mistress,” Markel murmured as he rushed to her, “why on earth did you go and do that, dear heart? Is the bone in one piece? Feel the bone. The bone’s the main thing, forget the soft part, the soft part’ll mend and, as they say, it’s only for ladies’ playzeer. Don’t you howl, you wicked thing,” he fell upon the weeping Marinka. “Wipe your snot and go to mama. Eh, dear mistress, couldn’t I have managed this whole clothing antimony without you? You probably think, at first glance I’m a regular yard porter, but if you reason right, our natural state is cabinetmaking, what we did was cabinetmaking. You wouldn’t believe how much of that furniture, them wardrobes and cupboards, went through my hands, in the varnishing sense, or, on the contrary, some such mahogany wood or walnut. Or, for instance, what matches, in the rich bride sense, went floating, forgive the expression, just went floating right past my nose. And the cause of it all—the drinking article, strong drink.”
With Markel’s help, Anna Ivanovna got to the armchair, which he rolled up to her, and sat down, groaning and rubbing the hurt place. Markel set about restoring what had been demolished. When the top was attached, he said: “Well, now it’s just the doors, and it’ll be fit for exhibition.”
Anna Ivanovna did not like the wardrobe. In appearance and size it resembled a catafalque or a royal tomb. It inspired a superstitious terror in her. She gave the wardrobe the nickname of “Askold’s grave.” By this name she meant Oleg’s steed,1 a thing that brings death to its owner. Being a well-read woman in a disorderly way, Anna Ivanovna confused the related notions.
With this fall began Anna Ivanovna’s predisposition for lung diseases.
2
Anna Ivanovna spent the whole of November 1911 in bed. She had pneumonia.
Yura, Misha Gordon, and Tonya were to finish university and the Higher Women’s Courses in the spring. Yura would graduate as a doctor, Tonya as a lawyer, and Misha as a philologist in the philosophy section.
Everything in Yura’s soul was shifted and entangled, and everything was sharply original—views, habits, and predilections. He was exceedingly impressionable, the novelty of his perceptions not lending itself to description.
But greatly as he was drawn to art and history, Yura had no difficulty in choosing a career. He considered art unsuitable as a calling, in the same sense that innate gaiety or an inclination to melancholy could not be a profession. He was interested in physics and natural science, and held that in practical life one should be occupied with something generally useful. And so he chose medicine.
Four years back, during his first year, he had spent a whole semester in the university basement studying anatomy on corpses. He reached the cellar by a winding stair. Inside the anatomy theater disheveled students crowded in groups or singly. Some ground away, laying out bones and leafing through tattered, rot-eaten textbooks; others silently dissected in a corner; still others bantered, cracked jokes, and chased the rats that scurried in great numbers over the stone floor of the mortuary. In its darkness, the corpses of unknown people glowed like phosphorus, striking the eye with their nakedness: young suicides of unestablished identity; drowned women, well preserved and still intact. Alum injections made them look younger, lending them a deceptive roundness. The dead bodies were opened up, taken apart, and prepared, and the beauty of the human body remained true to itself in any section, however small, so that the amazement before some mermaid rudely thrown onto a zinc table did not go away when diverted from her to her amputated arm or cut-off hand. The basement smelled of formalin and carbolic acid, and the presence of mystery was felt in everything, beginning with the unknown fate of all these stretched-out bodies and ending with the mystery of life and death itself, which had settled here in the basement as if in its own home or at its headquarters.
The voice of this mystery, stifling everything else, pursued Yura, interfering with his dissecting. But many other things in life interfered with him in the same way. He was used to it, and the distracting interference did not disturb him.
Yura thought well and wrote very well. Still in his high school years he dreamed of prose, of a book of biographies, in which he could place, in the form of hidden explosive clusters, the most astounding things of all he had managed to see and ponder. But he was too young for such a book, and so he made up for it by writing verses, as a painter might draw sketches all his life for a great painting he had in mind.