1
Lara lay half delirious in the bedroom on Felitsata Semyonovna’s bed. Around her the Sventitskys, Dr. Drokov, the servants were whispering.
The Sventitskys’ empty house was sunk in darkness, and only in the middle of the long suite of rooms, in a small sitting room, was there a dim wall lamp burning, casting its light up and down the length of this single extended hallway.
Through it, not like a guest, but as if he were in his own home, Viktor Ippolitovich paced rapidly with angry and resolute steps. Now he looked into the bedroom to ask what was going on there, now he set off for the opposite end of the house and, going past the Christmas tree with its strings of silver beads, came to the dining room, where the table was laden with untouched food and the green wineglasses tinkled whenever a carriage drove by outside the window or a little mouse darted over the tablecloth among the dishes.
Komarovsky stormed and raged. Contradictory feelings crowded in his breast. What scandal and indecency! He was furious. His position was threatened. The incident might undermine his reputation. He had at all costs to forestall, to cut short any gossip before it was too late, and if the news had already spread, to hush up, to stifle the rumors at their source. Besides that, he again experienced how irresistible this desperate, crazy girl was. You could see at once that she was not like everyone else. There had always been something extraordinary about her. Yet how painfully and, apparently, irreparably he had mutilated her life! How she thrashes about, how she rises up and rebels all the time, striving to remake her fate in her own way and begin to exist over again!
He has to help her from all points of view, perhaps to rent a room for her, but in any case not to touch her; on the contrary, to withdraw completely, to step aside, so as to cast no shadow, otherwise, being what she is, she might just pull something else for all he knows.
And there’s so much trouble ahead! You don’t get patted on the head for such things. The law never naps. It’s still night and less than two hours since the incident took place, but the police had already come twice, and Komarovsky had gone to the kitchen to have a talk with the police officer and settle it all.
And the further it goes, the more complicated it will get. They’ll demand proof that Lara was aiming at him and not at Kornakov. But things won’t end there. Part of the responsibility will be taken off Lara, but she will be liable to prosecution for the rest.
Naturally, he will do everything in his power to prevent that, and if proceedings are started, he will obtain findings from psychiatric experts that Lara was not answerable at the moment of the shooting, and have the case dropped.
After these thoughts Komarovsky began to calm down. The night was over. Streaks of light began to dart from room to room, peeking under the tables and sofas like thieves or pawnshop appraisers.
Having stopped at the bedroom and learned that Lara was no better, Komarovsky left the Sventitskys’ and went to see a lady of his acquaintance, Rufina Onisimovna Voit-Voitkovskaya, a lawyer and the wife of a political émigré. Her eight-room apartment now exceeded her needs and was beyond her means. She rented out two rooms. One of them had recently been vacated, and Komarovsky took it for Lara. A few hours later Lara was transported there with a high temperature and half-conscious. She had brain fever.
2
Rufina Onisimovna was a progressive woman, the enemy of prejudice, the well-wisher, as she thought and expressed it, of all that was “positive and viable” around her.
On her chest of drawers lay a copy of the Erfurt Program with a dedication by the author. One of the photographs pinned to the wall showed her husband, “my good Voit,” at a popular fairground in Switzerland together with Plekhanov.1 They were both wearing lustrine jackets and panama hats.
Rufina Onisimovna disliked her sick lodger at first glance. She considered Lara an inveterate malingerer. Lara’s fits of delirium seemed a pure sham to Rufina Onisimovna. She was ready to swear that Lara was playing the mad Gretchen in prison.2
Rufina Onisimovna expressed her contempt for Lara by a heightened animation. She slammed doors and sang loudly, rushed like a whirlwind around her part of the apartment, and spent whole days airing out the rooms.
Her apartment was on the top floor of a big house on the Arbat. The windows of this floor, starting with the winter solstice, were filled to overflowing with light blue sky, wide as a river in flood. For half the winter the apartment was full of signs of the coming spring, its harbingers.
A warm breeze from the south blew through the vent windows, locomotives howled rendingly in the train stations, and the ailing Lara, lying in bed, gave herself at leisure to distant memories.
Very often she remembered the first evening of their arrival in Moscow from the Urals, seven or eight years ago, in her unforgettable childhood.
They rode in a hack through semidark lanes across the whole of Moscow, from the train station to the hotel. The street lamps, approaching and withdrawing, cast the shadow of their hunched cabby on the walls of the buildings. The shadow grew, grew, reached unnatural dimensions, covered the pavement and the roofs, then dropped away. And everything began again.
In the darkness overhead the forty-times-forty Moscow churches rang their bells, on the ground horse-drawn streetcars drove around clanging, but the gaudy shop windows and lights also deafened Lara, as if they, too, gave out a sound of their own, like the bells and wheels.
In the hotel room, she was stunned by an unbelievably huge watermelon on the table, Komarovsky’s welcoming gift in their new lodgings. The watermelon seemed to Lara a symbol of Komarovsky’s imperiousness and of his wealth. When Viktor Ippolitovich, with a stroke of the knife, split in two the loudly crunching, dark green, round marvel, with its ice-cold, sugary insides, Lara’s breath was taken away from fear, but she did not dare refuse. She forced herself to swallow the pink, fragrant pieces, which stuck in her throat from agitation.
And this timidity before the costly food and the nighttime capital was then repeated in her timidity before Komarovsky—the main solution to all that came after. But now he was unrecognizable. He demanded nothing, gave no reminders of himself, and did not even appear. And, keeping his distance, constantly offered his help in the noblest way.
Kologrivov’s visit was quite another matter. Lara was very glad to see Lavrenty Mikhailovich. Not because he was so tall and stately, but owing to the liveliness and talent he exuded, the guest took up half the room with himself, his sparkling eyes, and his intelligent smile. The room became crowded.
He sat by Lara’s bed rubbing his hands. When he was summoned to the council of ministers in Petersburg, he talked with the old dignitaries as if they were prankish schoolboys. But here before him lay a recent part of his domestic hearth, something like his own daughter, with whom, as with everyone at home, he exchanged glances and remarks only in passing and fleetingly (this constituted the distinctive charm of the brief, expressive communications, both sides knew that). He could not treat Lara gravely and indifferently, like a grown-up. He did not know how to talk with her so as not to offend her, and so he said, smiling to her, as to a child:
“What’s this you’re up to, my dearest? Who needs these melodramas?” He fell silent and started examining the damp spots on the ceiling and wallpaper. Then, shaking his head reproachfully, he went on: “An exhibition is opening in Düsseldorf, an international one—of painting, sculpture, and gardening. I’m going. Your place is a bit damp. How long do you intend to hang between heaven and earth? There’s not much elbow room here, God knows. This Voitessa, just between us, is perfect trash. I know her. Move. Enough lolling about. You’ve been sick and there’s an end to it. Time to get up. Move to another room, go back to your studies, finish school. There’s an artist I know. He’s going to Turkestan for two years. His studio is divided up by partitions, and, strictly speaking, it’s a whole little apartment. It seems he’s prepared to leave it, together with the furnishings, in good hands. Would you like me to arrange it? And there’s also this. Let me talk business. I’ve long been meaning, it’s my sacred duty … Since Lipa … Here’s a small sum, a bonus for her graduation … No, let me, let me … No, I beg you, don’t be stubborn … No, excuse me, please.”