Mr. Luvers told Seryozha that it was only a few steps to the high school, it was quite near by. They had seen it on their way to the house. Their father drank some mineral water, swallowed and continued: “Didn’t I show it to you? You can’t see it from here, perhaps from the kitchen.” He thought it over. “But only the roof.” He took another swallow of mineral water and rang the bell.
The kitchen was cool and light, just as Zhenya had imagined it in the dining room; the blue-white tiles sparkled, and there were two windows, arranged as she had imagined they would be. Ulyasha threw something over her exposed arms. They heard children’s voices from outside and saw people walking on the roof of the high school and just the top of a scaffolding. “Yes, they are making repairs,” explained their father as they returned noisily, in single file, to the dining room. They passed through the already known but yet unexplored corridor, which Zhenya vowed to explore more thoroughly tomorrow when she had unpacked her schoolbooks, hung up her clothes and attended to a thousand other things.
“Excellent butter,” said their mother as she sat down. The children went into the schoolroom, which they had already briefly inspected on their arrival, caps still on their heads. “What is this Asia?” Zhenya reflected aloud. But Seryozha failed to understand what he surely would have understood at any other time, for until now they had lived in the same world. He ran to the map on the wall, drew his hand up and down the ridge of the Urals and looked at his sister, who he thought should be convinced by this demonstration. “They agreed upon a natural frontier, that’s all.”
She thought of today’s noon hour, already so far in the past. It was incredible that this day, which already contained so much—the same day that was now in Yekaterinburg and was still here—was not yet over. At thought of all this withdrawing to a certain distance, yet still maintaining its breathless order, she felt a strange weariness in her soul, a feeling that the body has on the evening of a day heavy with work. It was as if she had helped in moving these heavy, beautiful things and had overstrained herself. And somehow convinced that they—the Urals—were there, she turned and ran into the kitchen, passing through the dining room, where there were now fewer dishes but the “excellent” iced butter on wet maple leaves and the irritating mineral water still remained.
The high school was being repaired and shrill swallows tore the air, as a seamstress tears linen with her teeth, while below—she leaned out of the window—a coach gleamed before the open coachhouse, sparks flew from a whetstone, and there was a smell of leftover food, so much better and more interesting a smell than that of freshly prepared food. It was a long-drawn, melancholy odor, as in a book. She forgot why she was standing there and failed to notice that her Urals were not in Yekaterinburg. Then she noticed that it was gradually growing darker and that the people on the floor below were singing, probably while doing housework. Perhaps they had washed the floors and were now spreading the bast mats with their warm hands. She also heard water spilling into pails below, and yet how quiet it was all around. She heard a faucet dripping and the call, “Well, now, miss!” but she was still shy of the new girl and she didn’t want to hear her. And now—she thought her thought to its end—the people below must be saying, “The people on the second floor have arrived.” Then Ulyasha came into the kitchen.
The children slept deeply the first night and they woke up, Seryozha in Yekaterinburg, Zhenya in Asia, as it seemed to her with a strange certainty. White alabaster ornaments were playing on the ceiling.
It was still summer when it started. It was explained to her that she would go to high school, and this only pleased her. It was not she who called the tutor into the schoolroom, where sunlight stuck so fast to the distempered walls that, when evening came, the tenaciously clinging day could be torn off only with bloodshed. She had not called for him when he arrived, accompanied by her mother, to be introduced “to his future pupil.” Did she by any chance wish that soldiers must always exercise in the noonday beat, giant, panting soldiers, with sweat like the red stuff that comes from the faucet of a damaged water main? She did not wish that a violet storm cloud, which knows more of guns and artillery than of white shirts, white tents and even whiter officers, should ease off their boots. Had she by any chance prayed that two things, a bowl and a napkin, should be combined like the carbon elements of an are lamp and produce a third thing that turned in a flash into steam: the idea of death? It was while looking at the emblem of barbershops that this idea had first come to her. And did the red barricades, with the notice of “No Standing Here,” become, perhaps, with her consent a place of hidden secrets, and the Chinese turn into something terrible that terrified Zhenya personally? Not everything weighed so heavily upon her soul. Much was beautiful, for instance her forthcoming attendance at high school. But when everything was explained to her, life ceased to be a poetic whim; it billowed around her like a gloomy, dark tale and became hard, factual prose. Dull, painful and dim, like a state of perpetual sobering up, the elements of the day’s routine fell into her awakening soul. They sank to the bottom, real, hard and cold, like sleepy tin spoons. There, in the depths, the tin began to melt, became lumpy and turned into pressing thoughts.
5
The Belgians came often to tea. That’s what they were called. That’s what their father called them when he said, “The Belgians are coming today.” There were four of them. The beardless one came rarely and was less talkative. Sometimes he came alone, by accident, in the middle of the week and chose an ugly, rainy day for his visit. The other three were inseparable. Their faces, scented and cool, reminded one of fresh pieces of soap, just unwrapped. One of them had a thick, fluffy beard and soft, chestnut-brown hair. They always came with Mr. Luvers from some conference. Everyone in the house liked them. They spoke as if they were sprinkling water on the tablecloth—noisily, briskly, with sudden twists that nobody expected. Their jokes and anecdotes, clean and satisfying, were always understood by the children.
Noise was everywhere, everything flashed—the sugar bowl, the nickel coffeepot, the strong white teeth, the heavy linen. With Mrs. Luvers they joked pleasantly and courteously. As her husband’s colleagues, they knew how to restrain him when he made ponderous replies, to their allusions to people only they, as experts, really knew. Haltingly and long-windedly, in bad French, Mr. Luvers told stories of contractors, of “références approuvées” and of “férocités,” that is “bestialités, ce qui veut dire en russe, embezzlements, in Blagodat.”
The beardless one, who had been eagerly learning Russian for some time, often tried himself out in this new territory, but it wouldn’t bear his weight as yet. It was improper to laugh over the French sentences of their father, whose “férocités” were embarrassing to the children, but the laughter that drowned out Negarat’s experiments in Russian seemed to be justified by the situation itself.
His name was Negarat. He was a Walloon from the Flemish part of Belgium. They recommended Dikikh, Zhenya’s tutor, to him. He wrote down the address in Russian and made very comic pictures of complicated letters like “yu, ya, yat!” They looked as if they were double, these letters, as if they stood straddle-legged. The children let themselves kneel on the leather seats of the chairs and lean their elbows on the table—everything was allowed when the Belgians were there, everything was higgledy-piggledy. The letter “yu” was not a “yu” but a figure too. They all shouted and shook with laughter. Evans hit the table with his fist and wiped away his tears. Their father walked up and down the room, shaking and red-faced, saying over and over, “No, I can’t go on,” and crumpled his handkerchief in his hand. Evans added fuel to the fire: “Faîtes de nouveau! Commencez!” Negarat timidly opened his mouth, as if fearful of stuttering, and considered how to pronounce the Russian “yery,” still as unexplored as the colonies along the Congo. “Dites: uvy-nevy-godno,” their father proposed to him in a hoarse, choking voice. “Ouivoui, nievoui….”