Humanity was dense and heavy, heavy with flesh, with blood, with suffering, eternally clinging to itself like all that dies; but even blood, even flesh, even suffering, even death was being absorbed up there in the light like music in the silent night; he thought of Kama’s music, and human grief seemed to him to rise and to lose itself in the very song of earth; upon the quivering release hidden within him like his heart, the grief which he had mastered slowly closed its inhuman arms.
“Do you smoke much?" she repeated.
She had already asked this, but he had not heard her. His eyes returned to the room:
“Do you think I don’t guess what you are thinking, and do you think I don’t know it better than you? Do you even think it would not be easy for me to ask you by what right you judge me?”
He looked at her:
“Have you no desire to have a child?”
She did not answer: this always passionate desire now seemed to her a betrayal. But she was contemplating his serene face with terror. It was in truth returning from the deep regions of death, foreign like one of the corpses in the common ditches. In the repression that had beaten down upon exhausted China, in the anguish or hope of the masses, Kyo’s activity remained incrusted like the inscriptions of the early empires in the river gorges. But even old China, which these few men had hurled irrevocably into the darkness of the past with the roar of an avalanche, was not more effaced from the world than the meaning of Kyo’s life from the face of his father. He went on:
“The only thing I loved has been torn from me, you see, and you expect me to remain the same. Do you think my love was not as great as yours-you whose life has not even changed?”
“As the body of a living person who becomes a dead one does not change. ”
He took her hand:
“You know the phrase: ‘It takes nine months to make a man, and a single day to kill him.’ We both know this as well as one can know it. May, listen: it does not take nine months, it takes fifty years to make a man, fifty years of sacrifice, of will, of. of so many things! And when this man is complete, when there is nothing left in him of childhood, nor of adolescence, when he is really a man-he is good for nothing but to die.”
She looked at him, stunned: he was looking at the clouds.
“I loved Kyo as few men love their children, you know that. ”
He was still holding her hand; he drew it towards him, took it between his two hands:
“Listen to me: one must love the living and not the dead.”
“I am not going to Moscow to love.”
He looked out upon the magnificent bay, saturated with sunlight. She had withdrawn her hand.
“On the road of vengeance, little May, one finds life. ”
“That’s not a reason for seeking it.”
She got up, gave him back her hand for a good-by. But he took her face between the palms of his hands and kissed her. Kyo had kissed her in this way, the last day, exactly in this way, and never since had hands held her head.
“I hardly ever weep any more, now,” she said with a bitter pride.