“Do you remember, at the Christmas party on the dreadful night of your mother’s death, a girl shot at a prosecutor? It seems she was tried later. As I recall, I told you then that Misha and I had seen this girl when she was still in high school, in some trashy hotel rooms we had gone to with your father, for what purpose I don’t remember, at night, in the freezing cold, during an armed uprising on Presnya, as it now seems to me. That girl is Antipova.
“I have tried several times to go home. But it is not so simple. What mainly keeps us here is not the work, which we could turn over to others without any harm. The difficulties are presented by the trip itself. The trains either don’t run at all or come so full that it is impossible to get on them.
“However, to be sure, it cannot go on like this endlessly, and therefore several people who have recovered or have left the service or been discharged, including myself, Galiullin, and Antipova, have decided at all costs to leave starting next week, and, to make taking the train easier, to leave separately on different days.
“I may arrive any day now like a bolt from the blue. However, I will try to send you a telegram.”
But even before his departure, Yuri Andreevich had time to receive a reply from Antonina Alexandrovna.
In her letter, in which the construction of the sentences was broken by sobs, and tearstains and inkblots served as periods, Antonina Alexandrovna insisted that her husband should not return to Moscow, but go straight on to the Urals after that wonderful nurse, who journeys through life accompanied by such portents and coincidences, with which her, Tonya’s, modest path in life could not be compared.
“Don’t worry about Sashenka and his future,” she wrote. “You will not have to be ashamed for him. I promise to bring him up by those same principles that you saw an example of as a child in our home.”
“You’re out of your mind, Tonya,” Yuri Andreevich rushed to reply. “What suspicions! Don’t you know, or don’t you know well enough, that you, the thought of you, and faithfulness to you and our home saved me from death and all sorts of destruction during these two horrible and devastating years of war? Anyhow, there’s no need for words. Soon we’ll see each other, our former life will begin again, everything will become clear.
“But that you could reply to me like that frightens me in another way. If I gave you cause for such a reply, maybe I am indeed behaving ambiguously, and am therefore also to blame before this woman for misleading her, and will have to apologize to her. I will do so as soon as she comes back from making the round of several nearby villages. The zemstvo, which previously existed only in provinces and districts, is now being introduced on a lower level, in village neighborhoods. Antipova went to help her acquaintance, a woman who works as an instructor in these legislative innovations.
“It is remarkable that, living in the same house with Antipova, I am unaware to this day of where her room is, and I’ve never been interested in finding out.”
3
Two main roads went east and west from Meliuzeevo. One, a forest dirt road, led to Zybushino, a grain trading post, administratively subordinate to Meliuzeevo, but far ahead of it in all respects. The other, paved with gravel, was laid across swampy meadows that dried up in the summer and went to Biriuchi, a railway junction not far from Meliuzeevo.
That June in Zybushino the independent republic of Zybushino, which lasted for two weeks, was proclaimed by the local miller Blazheiko.
The republic was supported by deserters from the 212th infantry regiment, who, weapons in hand, abandoned their positions and came through Biriuchi to Zybushino at the moment of the coup.
The republic did not recognize the authority of the Provisional Government2 and separated itself from the rest of Russia. The sectarian Blazheiko, who as a young man had corresponded with Tolstoy, proclaimed a new thousand-year kingdom in Zybushino, communalized labor and property, and renamed the local administration an apostolate.
Zybushino had always been a source of legends and exaggerations. It stood in the deep forest, was mentioned in documents from the Time of Troubles,3 and in later times its environs swarmed with robbers. The prosperity of its merchants and the fantastic fertility of its soil were on everyone’s lips. Some of the beliefs, customs, and peculiarities of speech that distinguished this western sector of the front line came precisely from Zybushino.
Now the same sort of tall tales were told about Blazheiko’s chief assistant. It was maintained that he was deaf and dumb from birth, acquired the gift of speech under inspiration, and lost it again when the illumination expired.
In July the Zybushino republic fell. A unit loyal to the Provisional Government entered the place. The deserters were driven out of Zybushino and withdrew to Biriuchi.
There, beyond the tracks, for a few miles around, stood a cleared forest, with stumps sticking up overgrown with wild strawberry, stacks of old, undelivered firewood, half of which had been stolen, and the dilapidated mud huts of the seasonal woodcutters who had once worked there. It was here that the deserters lodged themselves.
4
The hospital in which the doctor had been a patient, and had then worked, and which he was now preparing to leave, was housed in the mansion of the countess Zhabrinskaya, which the owner had donated for the care of the wounded at the beginning of the war.
The two-story mansion occupied one of the best locations in Meliuzeevo. It stood at the intersection of the main street with the central square of the town, the so-called “platz,” on which soldiers formerly performed their drills and meetings now took place in the evenings.
Its position at the intersection gave the mansion good views on several sides. Besides the main street and the square, one could see the next-door neighbors’ yard—a poor provincial property, in no way different from a villager’s. One could also see the countess’s old garden behind the back wall of the house.
The mansion had never had any independent value for Countess Zhabrinskaya. Razdolnoe, a large estate in the district, belonged to her, and the house in town served only as a pied-à-terre for business visits, and also as a gathering place for guests who came to the estate from all sides in the summer.
Now there was a hospital in the house, and the owner had been arrested in Petersburg, her place of permanent residence.
Of the former staff, two curious women remained in the mansion, Mademoiselle Fleury, the old governess of the countess’s daughters (now married), and the countess’s former first cook, Ustinya.
The gray-haired and ruddy-cheeked old woman, Mademoiselle Fleury, shuffling her slippers, in a loose, shabby jacket, slovenly and disheveled, strolled about the whole hospital, where she was now on familiar terms with everyone, as once with the Zhabrinsky family, and told something or other in broken language, swallowing the endings of the Russian words in French fashion. She struck a pose, swung her arms, and at the end of her babble burst into hoarse laughter, which turned into a prolonged, irrepressible coughing.
Mademoiselle knew all about the nurse Antipova. It seemed to her that the doctor and the nurse simply must like each other. Yielding to the passion for matchmaking deeply rooted in the Latin nature, Mademoiselle was glad when she found them together, shook her finger at them meaningfully, and winked mischievously. Antipova was perplexed, the doctor was angry, but Mademoiselle, like all eccentrics, greatly valued her delusions and would not part with them for anything.
Ustinya presented a still more curious nature. She was a woman of a figure tapering awkwardly upward, which gave her the look of a brooding hen. Ustinya was dry and sober to the point of venom, but with that rationality she combined an unbridled fantasy with regard to superstitions.