Yura forgave these verses the sin of their coming to be for the sake of their energy and originality. These two qualities, energy and originality, Yura considered representative of reality in the arts, which were pointless, idle, and unnecessary in all other respects.
Yura realized how much he owed to his uncle for the general qualities of his character.
Nikolai Nikolaevich was living in Lausanne. In the books he published there in Russian and in translation, he developed his long-standing notion of history as a second universe, erected by mankind in response to the phenomenon of death with the aid of the phenomena of time and memory. The soul of these books was a new understanding of Christianity, their direct consequence a new understanding of art.
Even more than on Yura, the circle of these notions had an effect on his friend. Under their influence, Misha Gordon chose philosophy as his specialty. In his department, he attended lectures on theology, and he even had thoughts of transferring later to the theological academy.
The uncle’s influence furthered Yura and liberated him, but it fettered Misha. Yura understood what role in Misha’s extreme enthusiasms was played by his origins. From cautious tactfulness, he did not try to talk Misha out of his strange projects. But he often wished to see an empirical Misha, much closer to life.
3
One evening at the end of November, Yura came home late from the university, very tired, having eaten nothing all day. He was told there had been a terrible alarm in the afternoon; Anna Ivanovna had had convulsions, several doctors had come, they had advised sending for a priest, but then the idea was dropped. Now it was better, she was conscious and asked them to send Yura to her without delay, as soon as he came home.
Yura obeyed and, without changing, went to the bedroom.
The room bore signs of the recent turmoil. With soundless movements, a nurse was rearranging something on the bedside table. Crumpled napkins and damp towels from compresses lay about. The water in the rinsing bowl was slightly pink from spat-up blood. In it lay glass ampoules with broken-off tips and waterlogged wads of cotton.
The sick woman was bathed in sweat and licked her dry lips with the tip of her tongue. Her face was noticeably pinched compared with the morning, when Yura had last seen her.
“Haven’t they made a wrong diagnosis?” he thought. “There are all the signs of galloping pneumonia. This looks like the crisis.” Having greeted Anna Ivanovna and said something encouragingly empty, as people always do in such cases, he sent the nurse away. Taking Anna Ivanovna’s wrist to count her pulse, he slipped his other hand under his jacket for the stethoscope. Anna Ivanovna moved her head to indicate that it was unnecessary. Yura realized that she needed something else from him. Gathering her strength, Anna Ivanovna began to speak:
“See, they wanted to confess me … Death is hanging over me … Any moment it may … You’re afraid to have a tooth pulled, it hurts, you prepare yourself … But here it’s not a tooth, it’s all, all of you, all your life … snap, and it’s gone, as if with pincers … And what is it? Nobody knows … And I’m anxious and frightened.”
Anna Ivanovna fell silent. Tears ran down her cheeks. Yura said nothing. After a moment Anna Ivanovna went on.
“You’re talented … And talent is … not like everybody else … You must know something … Tell me something … Reassure me.”
“Well, what can I say?” Yura said, fidgeted uneasily on the chair, got up, paced the room, and sat down again. “First, tomorrow you’ll get better—there are signs, I’ll stake my life on it. And then—death, consciousness, faith in resurrection … You want to know my opinion as a natural scientist? Maybe some other time? No? Right now? Well, you know best. Only it’s hard to do it like this, straight off.”
And he gave her a whole impromptu lecture, surprised himself at the way it came out of him.
“Resurrection. The crude form in which it is affirmed for the comfort of the weakest is foreign to me. And I’ve always understood Christ’s words about the living and the dead in a different way. Where will you find room for all these hordes gathered over thousands of years? The universe won’t suffice for them, and God, the good, and meaning will have to take themselves out of the world. They’ll be crushed in this greedy animal stampede.
“But all the time one and the same boundlessly identical life fills the universe and is renewed every hour in countless combinations and transformations. Here you have fears about whether you will resurrect, yet you already resurrected when you were born, and you didn’t notice it.
“Will it be painful for you, does tissue feel its own disintegration? That is, in other words, what will become of your consciousness? But what is consciousness? Let’s look into it. To wish consciously to sleep means sure insomnia, the conscious attempt to feel the working of one’s own digestion means the sure upsetting of its nervous regulation. Consciousness is poison, a means of self-poisoning for the subject who applies it to himself. Consciousness is a light directed outwards, consciousness lights the way before us so that we don’t stumble. Consciousness is the lit headlights at the front of a moving locomotive. Turn their light inwards and there will be a catastrophe.
“And so, what will become of your consciousness? Yours. Yours. But what are you? There’s the whole hitch. Let’s sort it out. What do you remember about yourself, what part of your constitution have you been aware of? Your kidneys, liver, blood vessels? No, as far as you can remember, you’ve always found yourself in an external, active manifestation, in the work of your hands, in your family, in others. And now more attentively. Man in other people is man’s soul. That is what you are, that is what your conscience breathed, relished, was nourished by all your life. Your soul, your immortality, your life in others. And what then? You have been in others and you will remain in others. And what difference does it make to you that later it will be called memory? It will be you, having entered into the composition of the future.
“Finally, one last thing. There’s nothing to worry about. There is no death. Death is not in our line. But you just said ‘talent,’ and that’s another thing, that is ours, that is open to us. And talent, in the highest, broadest sense, is the gift of life.
“There shall be no more death, says John the Theologian,2 and just listen to the simplicity of his argumentation. There shall be no more death, because the former things have passed. It’s almost the same as: there shall be no more death, because we’ve already seen all that, it’s old and we’re tired of it, and now we need something new, and this new thing is eternal life.”
He paced up and down the room while he spoke. “Sleep,” he said, going to the bed and putting his hands on Anna Ivanovna’s head. Several minutes went by. Anna Ivanovna began to fall asleep.
Yura quietly left the room and told Egorovna to send the nurse to the bedroom. “Devil knows,” he thought, “I’m turning into some sort of quack. Casting spells, healing by the laying on of hands.”
The next day Anna Ivanovna felt better.
4
Anna Ivanovna contrived to improve. In the middle of December she tried getting up, but was still very weak. She was advised to have a good long stay in bed.
She often sent for Yura and Tonya and for hours told them about her childhood, spent on her grandfather’s estate, Varykino, on the river Rynva in the Urals. Neither Yura nor Tonya had ever been there, but from Anna Ivanovna’s words, Yura could easily imagine those fifteen thousand acres of age-old, impenetrable forest, dark as night, pierced in two or three places, as if stabbing it with the knife of its meanders, by the swift river with its stony bottom and steep banks on the Krügers’ side.