Three more men were playing at the same table with Komarovsky. One of his partners, sitting next to him, was the father of the foppish lycée student who had invited Lara to waltz. Lara concluded as much from the two or three words she exchanged with him while they made a turn around the room. And the tall, dark-haired woman in black with the crazed, burning eyes and unpleasantly strained, snakelike neck, who kept going from the drawing room to the ballroom, the field of her son’s activity, and back to the drawing room and her card-playing husband, was Koka Kornakov’s mother. Finally, it became clear that the girl who had served as pretext for Lara’s complex feelings was Koka’s sister, and Lara’s conclusions had no grounds at all.
“Kornakov,” Koka had introduced himself to Lara at the very start. But then she had not caught it. “Kornakov,” he repeated at the last gliding turn, taking her to a chair and bowing out. This time Lara heard him. “Kornakov, Kornakov,” she fell to thinking. “Something familiar. Something unpleasant.” Then she remembered. Kornakov, the deputy prosecutor of the Moscow court. He had prosecuted the group of railway workers with whom Tiverzin had stood trial. At Lara’s request, Lavrenty Mikhailovich had gone to butter him up, so that he would not be so fierce at the trial, but could not make him bend. “So that’s how it is! Well, well, well. Curious. Kornakov. Kornakov.”
14
It was past twelve or one in the morning. Yura had a buzzing in his ears. After a break, during which tea and cookies were served in the dining room, the dancing began again. When the candles on the tree burned down, no one replaced them anymore.
Yura stood absentmindedly in the middle of the ballroom and looked at Tonya, who was dancing with someone he did not know. Gliding past Yura, Tonya tossed aside the small train of her too-long satin dress with a movement of her foot and, splashing it like a fish, disappeared into the crowd of dancers.
She was very excited. During the break, when they sat in the dining room, Tonya refused tea and quenched her thirst with mandarines, which she peeled in great number from their fragrant, easily separated skins. She kept taking from behind her sash or from her little sleeve a cambric handkerchief, tiny as a fruit tree blossom, and wiping the trickles of sweat at the edges of her lips and between her sticky fingers. Laughing and not interrupting the animated conversation, she mechanically tucked it back behind her sash or the frills of her bodice.
Now, dancing with an unknown partner and, as she turned, brushing against Yura, who was standing to the side and frowning, Tonya playfully pressed his hand in passing and smiled meaningfully. After one of these pressings, the handkerchief she was holding remained in Yura’s hand. He pressed it to his lips and closed his eyes. The handkerchief had the mingled smell of mandarine and of Tonya’s hot palm, equally enchanting. This was something new in Yura’s life, never before experienced, and its sharpness pierced him through. The childishly naïve smell was intimately reasonable, like a word whispered in the dark. Yura stood, covering his eyes and lips with the handkerchief in his palm and breathing it in. Suddenly a shot rang out in the house.
Everyone turned to the curtain that separated the drawing room from the ballroom. For a moment there was silence. Then turmoil set in. Everyone began to bustle and shout. Some rushed after Koka Kornakov to the place where the shot had resounded. People were already coming from there, threatening, weeping, and interrupting each other as they argued.
“What has she done, what has she done?” Komarovsky repeated in despair.
“Borya, are you alive? Borya, are you alive?” Mrs. Kornakov cried hysterically. “I’ve heard Dr. Drokov is among the guests here. Yes, but where is he, where is he? Ah, leave me alone, please. For you it’s a scratch, but for me it’s the justification of my whole life. Oh, my poor martyr, the exposer of all these criminals! Here she is, here she is, trash, I’ll scratch your eyes out, vile creature! Now she won’t get away! What did you say, Mr. Komarovsky? At you? She aimed at you? No, it’s too much. I’m in great distress, Mr. Komarovsky, come to your senses, I can’t take jokes now. Koka, Kokochka, what do you say to that! Your father … Yes … But the right hand of God … Koka! Koka!”
The crowd poured out of the drawing room into the ballroom. In the midst of them, loudly joking and assuring everyone that he was perfectly unharmed, walked Kornakov, pressing a clean napkin to the bleeding scratch on his slightly wounded left hand. In another group a little to the side and behind, Lara was being led by the arms.
Yura was dumbfounded when he saw her. The same girl! And again in such extraordinary circumstances! And again this graying one. But now Yura knows him. He is the distinguished lawyer Komarovsky; he was involved in the trial over father’s inheritance. No need to greet him, he and Yura pretend they’re not acquainted. But she … So it was she who fired the shot? At the prosecutor? It must be something political. Poor girl. She’ll get it now. What a proud beauty she is! And these! They’re dragging her by the arms, the devils, like a caught thief.
But he realized at once that he was mistaken. Lara’s legs had given way under her. They were holding her by the arms so that she would not fall, and they barely managed to drag her to the nearest armchair, where she collapsed.
Yura ran to her, so as to bring her to her senses, but for greater propriety he decided first to show concern for the imaginary victim of the attempt. He went to Kornakov and said:
“There was a request for medical assistance here. I can render it. Show me your hand. Well, you have a lucky star. It’s such a trifle I wouldn’t even bandage it. However, a little iodine won’t do any harm. Here’s Felitsata Semyonovna, we’ll ask her.”
Mrs. Sventitsky and Tonya, who were quickly approaching Yura, did not look themselves. They said he should drop everything and fetch his coat quickly, they had been sent for, something was wrong at home. Yura became frightened, supposing the worst, and, forgetting everything in the world, ran for his coat.
15
They did not find Anna Ivanovna alive when they came running headlong into the house from the Sivtsev entrance. Death had occurred ten minutes before their arrival. It was caused by a long fit of suffocation, resulting from an acute edema of the lungs that had not been diagnosed in time.
During the first hours Tonya cried her head off, thrashed in convulsions, and recognized no one. The next day she calmed down, listened patiently to what her father and Yura told her, but was able to respond only by nodding, because the moment she opened her mouth, grief overwhelmed her with its former force and howls began to escape her of themselves, as if she were possessed.
She spent hours on her knees beside the dead woman, in the intervals between panikhidas,6 embracing with her big, beautiful arms a corner of the coffin along with the edge of the platform it stood on and the wreaths that covered it. She did not notice anyone around her. But the moment her gaze met the gaze of her relations, she hurriedly got up from the floor, slipped out of the room with quick steps, swiftly ran upstairs to her room, holding back her sobs, and, collapsing on the bed, buried in her pillow the outbursts of despair that raged within her.
From grief, long standing on his feet, and lack of sleep, from the dense singing and the dazzling light of candles day and night, and from the cold he had caught during those days, there was a sweet confusion in Yura’s soul, blissfully delirious, mournfully enraptured.
Ten years before then, when his mother was being buried, Yura had been quite little. He could still remember how inconsolably he had wept, struck by grief and horror. Then the main thing was not in him. Then he was hardly even aware that there was some him, Yura, who had a separate existence and was of interest or value. Then the main thing was in what stood around him, the external. The outside world surrounded Yura on all sides, tangible, impenetrable, and unquestionable, like a forest, and that was why Yura was so shaken by his mother’s death, because he had been lost in that forest with her and was suddenly left alone in it, without her. This forest consisted of everything in the world—clouds, city signboards, the balls on fire towers, and the servers riding ahead of the carriage bearing the icon of the Mother of God, with earmuffs instead of hats on their heads, uncovered in the presence of the holy object. This forest consisted of shop windows in the arcades and the unattainably high night sky, with stars, dear God, and the saints.