Dikikh stood listening. There was no sound in the whole house beyond the rumbling of the mangle. He stood stiff as a stork, his neck stretched and one leg lifted to go to her aid. He went in search for the girl, believing there was no one at home and that she must have fainted. While he collided in the dark with strange objects of wood, wool and metal, Zhenya crouched in a corner and wept. He kept on searching and fumbling about, in his thoughts already lifting her unconscious body from the carpet, and winced when a tear-choked voice cried just beneath his elbow: “I’m here. Look out, there’s a glass cabinet there. Wait for me in the schoolroom.
The curtains and the star-bright winter night outside the window reached to the floor, while at the bottom, buried to the waist in heaps of snow and dragging chains of branches over the snow, the dreaming trees lifted toward the bright light in the window. And somewhere beyond the wall, the mangle rumbled, working on bed sheets. “How can this excessive sensitivity be explained?” the teacher wondered. “Obviously the dead man had a special meaning for the girl. She’s deeply upset.” He had explained periodical fractions to a child; but a grown girl, almost a young woman, had sent him into the schoolroom… and all this in a single month? Obviously, the dead man had made a deep, inexpungible impression upon this young woman. Impressions of this kind have a name. How strange! He had given her lessons every second day and had noticed nothing. She was extremely brave, and he was deeply sorry for her. But when would she cry herself out and come in to him? Everyone was probably out. He felt genuine sympathy for her. It was a night to remember!
He was mistaken. The impression he had in mind had nothing to do with it. But he wasn’t entirely wrong. The impression that was hiding behind all this in Zhenya’s mind was indeed inexpungible. It was deeper even than he believed. The girl couldn’t control this impression because it was important and vital to her; its importance lay in the fact that for the first time another human being had entered her life, the third person, without a name or with only a token name, who aroused neither hatred nor love, but what the Ten Commandments mean when they say: “Thou shalt not kill…. Thou shalt not steal….”
“Thou, individual and living one,” they say, “shalt not do to the unknown and the other what thou dost not wish done unto thyself.
Dikikh was much mistaken when he thought that impressions of this kind have a name. They have none.
Zhenya cried because she believed she was responsible for all this. After all, she had brought him into the family on the day she had seen him in the other people’s garden. And after she had unnecessarily, uselessly and senselessly noticed him, she had met him time and again, always both directly and indirectly, and against all probability, like the last time.
When she saw the book Dikikh took from the shelf she puckered her brow and declared: “No, I won’t answer questions today. Put it back, please. I’m sorry. Please forgive me.”
And without a word, the same hand thrust Lermontov back into the disorderly row of Russian classics.