She had already taken a drop and was obviously getting tipsy. But Yuri Andreevich also had a clamor in his head. He did not notice how Shura Schlesinger turned up at one end of the room and he at the other, at the head of the table. He was standing and, by all tokens, beyond his own expectations, speaking. He did not obtain silence all at once.
“Ladies and gentlemen … I want … Misha! Gogochka! … But what else can I do, Tonya, when they don’t listen? Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to say a couple of words. Something unheard-of, something unprecedented is approaching. Before it overtakes us, here is my wish for you. When it comes, God grant that we do not lose each other and do not lose our souls. Gogochka, you can shout hurrah afterwards. I haven’t finished. Stop talking in the corners and listen carefully.
“By the third year of the war a conviction has been formed in the people that sooner or later the boundary between the front and the rear will be effaced, the sea of blood will come to everyone and flood those who sat it out and entrenched themselves. That flood is the revolution.
“In the course of it, it might seem to you, as to us at the war, that life has ceased, everything personal is over, nothing happens in the world any more except killing and dying, and if we survive till there are notes and memoirs of this time, and we read those recollections, we will realize that in these five or ten years we have lived through more than some do in a whole century.
“I don’t know if the people themselves will rise and move like a wall, or if everything will be done in their name. An event of such enormity does not call for dramatic proofs. I’ll believe it without that. It’s petty to rummage around for the causes of cyclopean events. They don’t have any. Domestic squabbles have their genesis, and after so much pulling each other’s hair and smashing of dishes, no one can figure out who first began it. But everything truly great is without beginning, like the universe. It does not emerge, but is suddenly there, as if it always existed or fell from the sky.
“I also think that Russia is destined to become the first realm of socialism since the existence of the world. When that happens, it will stun us for a long time, and, coming to our senses, we will no longer get back the memory we have lost. We will forget part of the past and will not seek explanations for the unprecedented. The new order will stand around us, with the accustomedness of the forest on the horizon or the clouds over our heads. It will surround us everywhere. There will be nothing else.”
He said something more and by then had sobered up completely. But, as before, he did not hear very well what was being said around him, and his answers were beside the point. He saw manifestations of general love for him, but was unable to drive away the sorrow that made him not himself. And so he said:
“Thank you, thank you. I see your feelings. I don’t deserve them. But you shouldn’t love so sparingly and hurriedly, as if fearing you’ll have to love more strongly later.”
They all laughed and applauded, taking it for a deliberate witticism, while he did not know where to escape from the sense of impending misfortune, from the awareness of his powerlessness over the future, despite all his thirst for the good and capacity for happiness.
The guests were leaving. They all had long faces from fatigue. Yawning opened and closed their jaws, making them look like horses.
As they were saying good-bye, they drew the window curtain aside. Threw open the window. A yellowish dawn appeared, a wet sky covered with dirty, sallow clouds.
“There must have been a thunderstorm while we were blathering,” somebody said.
“I got caught in the rain on my way here. Barely made it,” confirmed Shura Schlesinger.
In the deserted and still-dark lane they could hear the sound of drops dripping from the trees, alternating with the insistent chirping of drenched sparrows.
There was a roll of thunder, like a plow drawing a furrow across the whole of the sky, and everything grew still. But then four resounding, belated booms rang out, like big potatoes dumped from a shovelful of loose soil in autumn.
The thunder cleared the space inside the dusty, smoke-filled room. Suddenly, like electrical elements, the component parts of existence became tangible—water and air, the desire for joy, earth, and sky.
The lane became filled with the voices of the departing guests. They went on loudly discussing something outside, exactly as they had just been wrangling about it in the house. The voices moved off, gradually dying down and dying out.
“So late,” said Yuri Andreevich. “Let’s go to bed. Of all the people in the world, I love only you and papa.”
5
August passed, September was coming to an end. The unavoidable was imminent. Winter was drawing near, and so, in the human world, was the foreordained, like winter’s swoon, which hung in the air and was on everyone’s lips.
They had to prepare for the cold, stock up on food, firewood. But in the days of the triumph of materialism, matter turned into a concept, food and firewood were replaced by the provision and fuel question.
People in the cities were helpless as children in the face of the approaching unknown, which overturned all established habits in its way and left devastation behind it, though it was itself a child of the city and the creation of city dwellers.
All around there was self-deception, empty verbiage. Humdrum life still limped, floundered, hobbled bow-legged somewhere out of old habit. But the doctor saw life unvarnished. Its condemnation could not be concealed from him. He considered himself and his milieu doomed. They faced ordeals, perhaps even death. The numbered days they had left melted away before his eyes.
He would have gone out of his mind, if it had not been for everyday trifles, labors, and cares. His wife, his child, the need to earn money, were his salvation—the essential, the humble, the daily round, going to work, visiting patients.
He realized that he was a pygmy before the monstrous hulk of the future; he feared it, he loved this future and was secretly proud of it, and for the last time, as if in farewell, with the greedy eyes of inspiration, he gazed at the clouds and trees, at the people walking down the street, at the big Russian city trying to weather misfortune, and was ready to sacrifice himself to make things better, and could do nothing.
The sky and the passersby he most often saw from the middle of the street, when crossing the Arbat by the pharmacy of the Russian Medical Society, at the corner of Starokoniushenny Lane.
He went back to work at his old hospital. By old memory it was still called Krestovozdvizhensky, though the community of that name had been disbanded. But they had not yet invented a new name for it at the hospital.
Differentiations had already begun there. To the moderates, whose dull-wittedness provoked the doctor’s indignation, he seemed dangerous; to politically advanced people, he seemed insufficiently red. Thus he found himself neither here nor there, having left one bank and not reached the other.
In the hospital, besides his immediate duties, the director charged him with looking after the general statistical accounting. How many forms, questionnaires, and blanks he had to go over, how many orders he had to fill out! Mortality rates, sick rates, the property status of the employees, the level of their civic consciousness and participation in elections, the unsatisfiable needs for fuel, provisions, medications—the central office of statistics was interested in all of it, and answers had to be provided for it all.
The doctor busied himself with all this at his old desk by the window of the interns’ room. Stacks of ruled paper of various forms and patterns lay before him, pushed to one side. Sometimes by snatches, besides periodic notes for his medical work, he wrote here his Playing at People, a gloomy diary or journal of those days, consisting of prose, verse, and miscellanea, suggested by the awareness that half of the people had stopped being themselves and were acting out who knows what.