This was the night of Holy Thursday, the day of the Twelve Gospels.4 In the depths behind the netlike veil of rain, barely distinguishable little lights, and the foreheads, noses, and faces lit up by them, set out and went floating along. The faithful were going to matins.
A quarter of an hour later, steps were heard coming from the monastery along the boards of the sidewalk. This was the shopkeeper Galuzina returning home from the just-begun service. She walked irregularly, now hastening, now stopping, a kerchief thrown over her head, her fur coat unbuttoned. She had felt faint in the stuffy church and had gone outside for a breath of air, and now she was ashamed and regretted that she had not stood through the service and for the second year had not gone to communion. But that was not the cause of her grief. During the day she had been upset by the mobilization order posted everywhere, which concerned her poor, foolish son Teresha. She had tried to drive this unpleasantness from her head, but the white scrap of the announcement showing everywhere in the darkness had reminded her of it.
Her house was around the corner, within arm’s reach, but she felt better outside. She wanted to be in the open air, she did not feel like going home to more stuffiness.
She was beset by sad thoughts. If she had undertaken to think them aloud, in order, she would not have had words or time enough before morning. But here in the street these joyless reflections fell upon her in whole lumps, and she could have done with them all in a few moments, in two or three turns from the corner of the monastery to the corner of the square.
The bright feast is at hand, and there’s not a living soul in the house, they’ve all gone off, leaving her alone. What, isn’t she alone? Of course she’s alone. Her ward, Ksiusha, doesn’t count. Who is she, anyway? There’s no looking into another’s heart. Maybe she’s a friend, maybe an enemy, maybe a secret rival. She came as an inheritance from her husband’s first marriage, as Vlasushka’s adopted daughter. Or maybe not adopted, but illegitimate? And maybe not a daughter at all, but from a completely different opera! Can you climb into a man’s soul? Though there’s nothing to be said against the girl. Intelligent, beautiful, well-behaved. Way smarter than the little fool Tereshka and her adoptive father.
So here she is alone on the threshold of the Holy Feast, abandoned, they’ve all flown off this way and that.
Her husband Vlasushka had gone down the high road to make speeches to the new recruits, as a send-off to their feats of arms. The fool would have done better to look after his own son, to protect him from mortal danger.
The son, Teresha, also couldn’t help himself and took to his heels on the eve of the great feast. Buzzed off to Kuteiny Posad to some relatives, to have fun, to comfort himself after what he’d gone through. The boy had been expelled from high school. Repeated half the classes and nobody said anything, but in the eighth year they lost patience and threw him out.
Ah, what anguish! Oh, Lord! Why has it turned out so bad? You just lose heart. Everything drops from your hands, you don’t want to live! Why has it turned out like this? Is it the force of the revolution? No, ah, no! It’s all because of the war. All the flower of manhood got killed, and what was left was worthless, good-for-nothing rot.
A far cry from her father’s home—her father the contractor. Her father didn’t drink, he was literate, the family lived in plenty. There were two sisters, Polya and Olya. The names went so nicely together, just as the two of them suited each other, a pair of beauties. And the head carpenters who called on their father were distinguished, stately, fine-looking. Then suddenly they took it into their heads—there was no want in the house—took it into their heads to knit scarves out of six kinds of wool. And what then? They turned out to be such knitters, their scarves became famous throughout the district. And everything used to give joy by its richness and shapeliness—church services, dances, people, manners—even though the family was from simple folk, tradesmen, from peasants and workers. And Russia, too, was a young girl, and she had real suitors, real protectors, not like nowadays. Now everything’s lost its sheen, there’s nothing but the civilian trash of lawyers and Yids, chewing words tirelessly, day and night, choking on words. Vlasushka and his retinue hope to lure the old golden times back with champagne and good wishes. Is that any way to win back a lost love? You’ve got to overturn stones for that, move mountains, dig up the earth!
4
More than once already, Galuzina had gone as far as the marketplace, the central square of Krestovozdvizhensk. From there her house was to the left. But she changed her mind each time, turned around, and again went deep into the back alleys adjacent to the monastery.
The marketplace was the size of a big field. On market days in former times, peasants had covered it all over with their carts. One end of it lay against the end of Eleninskaya Street. The other end was built up along a curved line with small one- or two-story houses. They were all used as storage spaces, offices, trading premises, and artisans’ workshops.
Here, in quiet times, on a chair by the threshold of his very wide, four-leaf iron door, reading the Penny Daily, the woman-hater Briukhanov used to sit, a boorish bear in spectacles and a long-skirted frock coat, a dealer in leather, tar, wheels, horse harness, oats, and hay.
Here, displayed in a dim little window, gathering dust for many years, stood several cardboard boxes of paired wedding candles, decorated with ribbons and little bunches of flowers. Behind the little window, in an empty little room without furniture and with almost no sign of goods, unless one counted several rounds of wax piled one on top of the other, deals in the thousands for mastic, wax, and candles were concluded by no one knew what agents of a candle millionaire who lived no one knew where.
Here, in the middle of the shop-lined street, was the big colonial shop of the Galuzins with its three-window façade. In it the splintery, unpainted floor was swept three times a day with the used leaves of the tea which the shopkeepers and owner drank without moderation all day long. Here the owner’s young wife had often and willingly kept the till. Her favorite color was purple, violet, the color of especially solemn church vestments, the color of unopened lilacs, the color of her best velvet dress, the color of her wineglasses. The color of happiness, the color of memories, the color of the long-vanished maidenhood of prerevolutionary Russia also seemed to her to be pale lilac. And she liked keeping the till at the shop, because the violet dusk of the premises, fragrant with starch, sugar, and deep purple black-currant candies in their glass jar, matched her favorite color.
Here, at the corner, next to the lumberyard, stood an old, gray, two-story wooden house, sagging on four sides like a secondhand coach. It consisted of four apartments. There were two entrances to them, at either end of the façade. The left half of the ground floor was occupied by Zalkind’s pharmacy, the right by a notary’s office. Over the pharmacy lived old Shmulevich, a ladies’ tailor, with his numerous family. Across from the tailor, over the notary, huddled many tenants, whose professions were announced on the signs and plaques that covered the whole front door. Here watches were repaired and a cobbler took in orders. Here the partners Zhuk and Shtrodakh kept a photography studio, here were the premises of the engraver Kaminsky.
In view of the crowdedness of the overfilled apartment, the photographers’ young assistants, the retoucher Senya Magidson and the student Blazhein, built themselves a sort of laboratory in the yard, in the front office of the woodshed. They were apparently busy there now, judging by the angry eye of the developing lamp blinking nearsightedly in the little window of the office. It was under this window that the little dog Tomka was chained up, yelping for the whole of Eleninskaya Street to hear.