This increased especially after her return to the city. Here to Lara’s troubles were added some slight disagreements with Pasha (Lara was careful not to quarrel seriously with him, because she considered him her last defense). Lately Pasha had acquired a certain self-confidence. The admonishing tones in his conversation upset her and made her laugh.
Pasha, Lipa, the Kologrivovs, money—it all started spinning in her head. Life became repugnant to Lara. She was beginning to lose her mind. She felt like dropping everything familiar and tested and starting something new. In that state of mind, around Christmastime of the year 1911, she came to a fateful decision. She decided to part from the Kologrivovs immediately and somehow build her life alone and independently, and to ask Komarovsky for the money needed for that. It seemed to Lara that after all that had happened and the subsequent years of her hard-won freedom, he should help her chivalrously, not going into any explanations, disinterestedly and without any filth.
With that aim she went, on December 27, to the Petrovsky neighborhood and, on the way out, put Rodya’s revolver, loaded and with the safety off, into her muff, intending to shoot Viktor Ippolitovich if he should refuse her, understand her perversely, or humiliate her in any way.
She walked in terrible perturbation along the festive streets, not noticing anything around her. The intended shot had already rung out in her soul, with total indifference to the one it had been aimed at. This shot was the only thing she was conscious of. She heard it all along the way, and it was fired at Komarovsky, at herself, at her own fate, and at the oak in Duplyanka with a target carved on its trunk.
8
“Don’t touch the muff,” she said to the oh-ing and ah-ing Emma Ernestovna when she reached out to help Lara take off her coat.
Viktor Ippolitovich was not at home. Emma Ernestovna went on persuading Lara to come in and take off her coat.
“I can’t. I’m in a hurry. Where is he?”
Emma Ernestovna said he was at a Christmas party. Address in hand, Lara ran down the gloomy stairs with the stained glass coats of arms in the windows, which vividly reminded her of everything, and set out for the Sventitskys’ in Flour Town.
Only now, going out for the second time, did Lara look around properly. It was winter. It was the city. It was evening.
It was freezing cold. The streets were covered with black ice, thick as the glass bottoms of broken beer bottles. It was painful to breathe. The air was choked with gray hoarfrost, and it seemed to tickle and prickle with its shaggy stubble, just as the icy fur of Lara’s collar chafed her and got into her mouth. With a pounding heart Lara walked along the empty streets. Smoke came from the doorways of tearooms and taverns along the way. The frostbitten faces of passersby, red as sausage, and the bearded muzzles of horses and dogs hung with icicles emerged from the mist. Covered with a thick layer of ice and snow, the windows of houses were as if painted over with chalk, and the colorful reflections of lighted Christmas trees and the shadows of merrymakers moved over their opaque surface, as if the people outside were being shown shadow pictures from inside on white sheets hung before a magic lantern.
In Kamergersky Lara stopped. “I can’t do it anymore, I can’t stand it” burst from her almost aloud. “I’ll go up and tell him everything,” she thought, regaining control of herself, opening the heavy door of the imposing entrance.
9
Red from the effort, his tongue stuck in his cheek, Pasha struggled before the mirror, putting on his collar and trying to stick the recalcitrant stud through the overstarched buttonhole of his shirt front. He was getting ready to go out, and he was still so pure and inexperienced that he became embarrassed when Lara came in without knocking and found him in such a minor state of undress. He noticed her agitation at once. Her legs were giving way under her. She came in, pushing her dress ahead at each step as if crossing a ford.
“What is it? What’s happened?” he asked in alarm, rushing to meet her.
“Sit down beside me. Sit down as you are. Don’t smarten yourself up. I’m in a hurry. I’ll have to leave at once. Don’t touch the muff. Wait. Turn away for a moment.”
He obeyed. Lara was wearing a two-piece English suit. She took the jacket off, hung it on a nail, and transferred Rodya’s revolver from the muff to the jacket pocket. Then, returning to the sofa, she said:
“Now you can look. Light a candle and turn off the electricity.”
Lara liked to talk in semidarkness with candles burning. Pasha always kept a spare unopened pack for her. He replaced the burned-down end in the candlestick with a new whole candle, placed it on the windowsill, and lit it. The flame choked on the stearine, shot crackling little stars in all directions, and sharpened into an arrow. The room filled with a soft light. The ice on the windowpane at the level of the candle began to melt, forming a black eyehole.
“Listen, Patulya,” said Lara. “I’m in difficulties. I need help to get out of them. Don’t be frightened and don’t question me, but part with the notion that we’re like everybody else. Don’t remain calm. I’m always in danger. If you love me and want to keep me from perishing, don’t put it off, let’s get married quickly.”
“But that’s my constant wish,” he interrupted her. “Quickly name the day, I’ll be glad to do it whenever you like. But tell me more simply and clearly, don’t torture me with riddles.”
But Lara distracted him, imperceptibly avoiding a direct answer. They talked for a long time on themes that had no relation to the subject of Lara’s grief.
10
That winter Yura was writing a scientific paper on the nervous elements of the retina in competition for a university gold medal. Though Yura would be graduating as a generalist, he knew the eye with the thoroughness of a future oculist.
This interest in the physiology of vision spoke for other sides of Yura’s nature—his creative gifts and his reflections on the essence of the artistic image and the structure of the logical idea.
Tonya and Yura were riding in a hired sleigh to the Christmas party at the Sventitskys’. The two had lived for six years side by side through the beginning of youth and the end of childhood. They knew each other in the smallest detail. They had habits in common, their own way of exchanging brief witticisms, their own way of snorting in response. And so they were riding now, keeping silent, pressing their lips from the cold, and exchanging brief remarks. And both thinking their own thoughts.
Yura recalled that the time for the contest was near and he had to hurry with the paper, and in the festive turmoil of the ending year that could be felt in the streets, he jumped from those thoughts to others.
In Gordon’s department a hectograph student magazine was published, and Gordon was the editor. Yura had long been promising them an article on Blok.5 The young people of both capitals were raving about Blok, he and Misha more than anyone.
But these thoughts did not remain long in Yura’s conscience. They rode on, tucking their chins into their collars and rubbing their freezing ears, and thought about differing things. But on one point their thoughts came together.
The recent scene at Anna Ivanovna’s had transformed them both. It was as if they had recovered their sight and looked at each other with new eyes.