It probably came from the heavy steps. The tea rose and fell in the glass on the bedside table. The slice of lemon floating in the tea rose and fell. The sun streaks on the carpet rocked to and fro. They swayed like columns, like rows of syrup bottles in shops with signboards showing a Turk smoking a pipe.
Showing a Turk… smoking… a pipe. Smoking… a pipe…
It probably came from the heavy steps. The sick girl went back to sleep.
Zhenya became ill the day after Negarat’s departure, the day she learned on her walk that Aksinya had given birth to a boy, the day she imagined, when she saw the furniture cart, that its owner was threatened with rheumatism. For two weeks she lay in fever, covered with perspiration, sprinkled all over with red pepper which burned her and glued her eyelids and the corners of her mouth together. The perspiration drove her to distraction, and the awareness of shapeless statues mingled with the feeling of being stung. As if the flame that caused her to swell had been poured into her by a summer wasp. As if the sting, a thin gray bristle, had remained stuck in her and she tried to get it out in all possible ways—sometimes from her violet cheekbones, sometimes from the inflamed shoulder that groaned under the nightdress, sometimes from other places.
Then her convalescence started and the feeling of weakness permeated everything. This feeling of weakness abandoned itself, at its own peril, to a strange geometry that was peculiar to it and which produced a slight giddiness and nausea.
It started, for example, on the bedspread. The feeling of weakness piled up on the bedspread rows of gradually growing, empty rooms, which in the shivery twilight rapidly began to take the shape of a square which formed the basis of this mad game with space. Or else it loosened band after band from the wallpaper pattern, which made unique patterns before her eyes, as if they were swimming on oil; one pattern took the place of another, their dimensions grew slowly and steadily, like all these hallucinations, and tormented her. Or else the feeling of weakness tortured the girl with a sense of measureless depths which betrayed their bottomlessness instantly with the very first trick they played on the dancing floor. The bed sank quietly into the abyss and the girl sank with it. Her head was like a lump of sugar which is thrown into a yawning, empty chaos, dissolves and disappears.
It came from the heavy steps. The slice of lemon rose and fell. The sun on the wallpaper rose and set….
Finally she woke up. Her mother came in and congratulated her on her recovery. Zhenya had the impression that her mother could read other people’s thoughts. When she woke up, she had heard similar words—the congratulations of her own hands, feet, elbows and knees, which she had accepted, stretching herself out. Their greeting had wakened her. And now Mama, too. It was a strange reunion.
The people in the house came and went, sat down and got up again. They asked questions and received answers. Some things had changed during her illness, others had remained unchanged. The former didn’t touch her, the latter gave her no peace. Her mother had obviously not changed. Neither had her father. But certain things had changed: herself, Seryozha, the distribution of light in the room, the quiet of the other people and some other things.
Had it snowed? Only a little and it melted immediately. There was only a little frost, it was hard to say how things looked, naked, without snow. She hardly noticed whom she asked and what she asked. The answers seemed like a pressure forced on her. The healthy people came and went. Lisa came. There was an argument. Then it occurred to everyone that you can get measles only once and they let her in. Dikikh visited her. She hardly noticed which answers came from whom. When everybody was eating lunch and she was alone with Ulyasha, she remembered how everybody in the kitchen had once laughed over her silly questions. She would be careful now not to ask about such things. She would ask only sensible, relevant questions, in the tone of a grownup. She asked whether Aksinya was pregnant again. The girl rattled the spoon when she took away the glass. “But, my dear child, let her have a rest. She cannot keep on being pregnant, Zhenichka.” She ran out and left the door only half-closed. The whole kitchen rumbled as if the shelves had fallen with all their dishes, and laughter was followed by a loud hooting. It flew toward the cleaning woman, flared up under her hands, clattered and rattled as if a quarrel had passed into blows. Then somebody came and shut the forgotten door.
What is this? Will it thaw again? Then she would have to go by coach again today, for it wasn’t yet possible to go by sleigh. With a chilly nose and hands stiff with cold, Zhenya stood a long time by the window. Dikikh had just left. He had been dissatisfied with her. How can one learn one’s lessons when outside the roosters crow and the sky rumbles and when the rumble ceases, the roosters crow again? Black, dirty clouds like a naked cave. The day thrusts his snout at the windowpane like a calf in a steaming barn. Will spring ever come again? But since lunch a blue-gray frost encircles the air like a hoop, the sky becomes hollow and collapses, the clouds breathe audibly, with a whistling sound, the hurrying hours, flying northward toward the winter darkness, tear the last leaves from the trees, flatten the lawns, break through the chinks, pierce the breast. The mouths of northern storms yawn black behind the house, laden with November. But it is still October.
It is still October. No one can remember such a winter. People say the winter seeds will freeze. They fear a famine. It was as if somebody winked and drew a circle with a magic wand around chimneys, roofs and the starlings’ boxes. There will be fog, snow and hoar frost. But until now, neither the one nor the other. The empty, hollow-cheeked twilight longs for them. It strains the eyes. The early lanterns and the lights in the houses hurt the earth, as one’s head is hurt by a long waiting, when one stares into the distance with dim eyes. Everything waits tensely, the firewood is already piled in the kitchen, for two weeks the clouds have been filled to the brim with snow, the air is pregnant with darkness. But when will the wizard who casts a spell over everything the eye can see and binds it within a magic circle pronounce his incantation and call forth the winter whose breath already steams just outside the door?
How had they neglected it? Really, nobody had bothered about the calendar in the schoolroom. She tore off the leaves. Childish! But still, it was not August 29! “That’s good,” Seryozha would have said. A red-letter day. The decapitation of John the Baptist. The calendar let itself be lifted easily from the nail. She tore off the leaves because she had nothing else to do. She grew bored and soon ceased to be aware of what she was doing, but from time to time she murmured to herself: “The thirtieth. Tomorrow is the thirty-first.”
The words “She hasn’t been outside for three days” reached her from the corridor, snatching her out of her daydreams. She observed how far her aimless work had taken her—all the way to the day of Mary’s Sacrifice. Her mother touched her hand. “Zhenya, I ask you, please tell me…”
She didn’t hear what followed, as if it hadn’t been said. As if in a dream, Zhenya interrupted her mother, and asked her to say, “The decapitation of John the Baptist.”
Her mother repeated these words uncomprehendingly. She didn’t say “Battist.” It was Aksinya who said that.
The next moment Zhenya was wondering about herself. What was it? Who had driven her to it? Where did it come from? Had she, Zhenya, asked this? How could she think that Mama—how fantastic and improbable! Who had invented all this?
Her mother was still standing there, not trusting her ears. She stared at Zhenya with large eyes. This outburst embarrassed her. This request sounded as if Zhenya wanted to make fun of her. But there were tears in her daughter’s eyes .7 Her dark foreboding came true. On the pleasure ride she noticed clearly that the air was growing milder and that the rattling of the hoofs sounded muffled. Even before she had lit the carriage lamps, dry flakes whirled through the air. They weren’t over the bridge before the individual flakes vanished and the snow fell as a thick, closely packed mass. Davlecha climbed down from the driver’s seat and put up the leather hood. For Zhenya and Seryozha it became dark and cavern-like. They would have liked to rage like the wild storm. They only noticed that Davlecha was driving home because they again heard the bridge under Vykormish’s hoofs. The roads could no longer be recognized—they were gone. The night closed in suddenly, the town looked like a crazy thing, moving countless thick, pale lips. Seryozha knelt on the seat, leaned out of the carriage and ordered the coachman to drive to the vocational school. Zhenya was lost in rapture when the secrets and charm of winter came to her with the echo of Seryozha’s words through the muffled air. Davlecha shouted back at him that they had to return home so as not to exhaust the horse; the master and mistress were going to the theater and the horses must be harnessed to the sleigh. This reminded Zhenya that her parents were going out tonight and they would be left alone in the house. She decided to sit cozily by the lamp till late into the night reading Tales of Murr the Tomcat, which were not intended for children. She would sneak the book out of Mama’s bedroom. And chocolate—she would read and eat chocolate, while listening to the howl of the wind through the streets.