“No, no, it’s risky,” the district tried to object, furtively exchanging meaningful glances with his assistant.
Galiullin tried to talk the commissar out of his insane plan. He knew the daredevils of the 212th from the division their regiment belonged to, in which he had once served himself. But the commissar would not listen to him.
Yuri Andreevich kept trying all the while to get up and leave. The commissar’s naïveté embarrassed him. But the sly knowingness of the district and his assistant, two jeering and underhanded finaglers, was not much better. The foolishness and the craftiness were worthy of each other. And all of it—superfluous, nonexistent, lackluster, which life itself so longs to avoid—spewed out in a torrent of words.
Oh, how one wants sometimes to go from such giftlessly high-flown, cheerless human wordiness into the seeming silence of nature, into the arduous soundlessness of long, persistent labor, into the wordlessness of deep sleep, of true music, and of a quiet, heartfelt touch grown mute from fullness of soul!
The doctor remembered that he still faced a talk with Antipova, unpleasant in any case. He was glad of the necessity to see her, even at that price. But it was unlikely that she had come back yet. Taking advantage of the first appropriate moment, the doctor got up and inconspicuously left the office.
6
As it happened, she was already at home. The doctor was informed of her arrival by Mademoiselle, who added that Larissa Fyodorovna had come back tired, quickly eaten supper, and gone to her room, asking not to be disturbed.
“But knock at her door,” Mademoiselle advised. “She’s probably not asleep yet.”
“And how do I find her?” asked the doctor, causing unutterable astonishment in Mademoiselle with the question.
It turned out that Antipova was lodged at the end of the upstairs corridor, next to the rooms where all of Zhabrinskaya’s belongings were locked away, and where the doctor had never been.
Meanwhile it was quickly getting dark. The streets contracted. Houses and fences huddled together in the evening darkness. From the depths of the courtyards, trees came up to the windows, to the light of the burning lamps. It was a hot and sultry night. Every movement made one break into a sweat. Strips of kerosene light, falling into the yard, ran down the tree trunks in streams of dirty perspiration.
At the last step, the doctor stopped. He thought that even to knock at the door of a person tired out from traveling was awkward and importunate. It would be better to put off the talk until the next day. In distraction, which always accompanies a change of mind, he walked to the other end of the corridor. There was a window there that gave onto the neighboring courtyard. The doctor leaned out.
The night was filled with soft, mysterious sounds. Close by in the corridor, water was dripping from a washstand, measuredly, with pauses. There was whispering somewhere behind a window. Somewhere, where the kitchen garden began, beds of cucumbers were being watered, water was being poured from one bucket into another, with a clink of the chain drawing it from the well.
It smelled of all the flowers in the world at once, as if the earth had lain unconscious during the day and was now coming to consciousness through all these scents. And from the countess’s centuries-old garden, so littered with windfallen twigs and branches that it had become impassable, there drifted, as tall as the trees, enormous as the wall of a big house, the dusty, thickety fragrance of an old linden coming into bloom.
Shouts came from the street beyond the fence to the right. A soldier on leave was acting up there, doors slammed, snippets of some song beat their wings.
Beyond the crow’s nests of the countess’s garden appeared a blackish purple moon of monstrous dimensions. At first it looked like the brick steam mill in Zybushino; then it turned yellow like the Biriuchi railway pump house.
And below, in the courtyard under the window, the scent of showy four o’clocks mingled with the sweet smell of fresh hay, like tea with flowers. Earlier a cow, bought in a far-off village, had been brought here. She had been led all day, was tired, missed the herd she had left, and refused to take food from the hands of her new mistress, whom she had not yet grown used to.
“Now, now, don’t be naughty, Bossie, I’ll teach you to butt, you devil,” the mistress admonished her in a whisper, but the cow either tossed her head angrily or stretched her neck and mooed rendingly and pitifully, while beyond the black sheds of Meliuzeevo the stars twinkled, and from them to the cow stretched threads of invisible compassion, as if they were the cattle yards of other worlds, where she was pitied.
Everything around fermented, grew, and rose on the magic yeast of being. The rapture of life, like a gentle wind, went in a broad wave, not noticing where, over the earth and the town, through walls and fences, through wood and flesh, seizing everything with trembling on its way. To stifle the effect of this current, the doctor went to the platz to listen to the talk at the meeting.
7
The moon was already high in the sky. Everything was flooded by its light, thick as spilled white lead.
By the porches of the official stone buildings with columns that surrounded the square, their wide shadows lay on the ground like black carpets.
The meeting was taking place on the opposite side of the square. If one wished, one could listen and make out everything that was being said across the platz. But it was the magnificence of the spectacle that fascinated the doctor. He sat down on a bench by the gates of the fire brigade, without paying attention to the voices heard across the street, and began to look around.
From all sides, obscure little streets flowed into the square. Deep down them one could see decrepit, lopsided little houses. The mud was as impassable in these little streets as in a village. From the mud long fences of woven willow withes stuck up, looking like nets thrown into a pond or baskets for catching crayfish.
In the little houses, the glass in the frames of the open windows gleamed weak-sightedly. From the front gardens, sweaty, fair-haired corn reached into the rooms, its silks and tassels gleaming as if they were oiled. From behind the sagging wattle fences, pale, lean mallows gazed solitarily into the distance, looking like farm women whom the heat had driven out of the stuffy cottages in their nightshirts for a breath of fresh air.
The moonlit night was astounding, like mercy or the gift of clairvoyance, and suddenly, into the silence of this bright, scintillating fairy tale, the measured, clipped sounds of someone’s voice, familiar, as if just heard, began to fall. The voice was beautiful, fervent, and breathed conviction. The doctor listened and at once recognized who it was. It was the commissar Gintz. He was speaking on the square.
The local powers had probably asked him to support them with his authority, and he, with great feeling, was reproaching the Meliuzeevans for being disorganized, for succumbing too easily to the corrupting influence of the Bolsheviks, the real perpetrators, he insisted, of the Zybushino events. In the same spirit as he had spoken at the military superior’s, he reminded them of the cruel and powerful enemy and the hour of trial that had struck for the motherland. Midway through his speech, he began to be interrupted.