Doctor

Zhivago

 

 

 

 

 

 

BORIS PASTERNAK

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A SIGNET BOOK

Published by THE NEW AMERICAN LIBRARY

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

© 1957 Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milano, Italy

 

©  1958 in the English translation

Wm. Collins Sons & Co., Ltd., London

 

© 1958 in authorized revisions to the English translation

by Pantheon Books, Inc., New York, New York.

 

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be

reproduced without permission. For information address

Pantheon Books, Inc., 22 East 51st Street,

New York, New York 10022.

 

This is an authorized reprint of a hardcover edition

published by Pantheon Books, Inc.

 

TWENTY-FIRST PRINTING

 

Translated from the Russian by Max Hayward and

Manya Harari; " The Poems of Yurii Zhivago, "

translated by Bernard Guilbert Guerney.

 

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AND FOREIGN COUNTRIES

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PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

 

 

 

The Principal Characters in This Book

 

Yurii Andreievich Zhivago (as a child, called Yura; affectionately, Yurochka) is the son of Andrei Zhivago, a profligate, and Maria Nikolaievna Zhivago. Evgraf Andreievich Zhivago, his half-brother, is the son of his father and Princess Stolbunova-Enrici. Nikolai Nikolaievich Vedeniapin (Uncle Kolia) is his maternal uncle.

Antonina Alexandrovna Gromeko (Tonia) is the daughter of Alexander Alexandrovich Gromeko, a professor of chemistry, and his wife, Anna Ivanovna, whose father was the landowner and ironmaster Ivan Ernestovich Krueger. As young people, Yurii Andreievich Zhivago and Misha Gordon, son of a lawyer, live with the Gromekos.

Larisa Feodorovna Guishar (Lara) is the daughter of a Russianized, widowed Frenchwoman, Amalia Karlovna Guishar. Rodion (Rodia) is her younger brother.

Victor Ippolitovich Komarovsky was Andrei Zhivago ' s lawyer and is Madame Guishar ' s lover and adviser.

Lavrentii Mikhailovich Kologrivov is a rich industrialist; his wife, Serafima Filippovna; their daughters, Nadia and Lipa.

Pavel Pavlovich Antipov (Pasha, Pashenka) is the son of a railway worker, Pavel Ferapontovich Antipov. After his father ' s exile to Siberia, he lives with the Tiverzins (Kuprian Savelievich and his mother, Marfa Gavrilovna), another revolutionary family of railway workers.

Osip Gimazetdinovich Galiullin (Yusupka), son of Gimazetdin, the janitor at the Tiverzins ' tenement; he is a Moslem.

Innokentii Dudorov (Nika), son of Dementii Dudorov, a revolutionary terrorist, and a Georgian princess.

Markel Shchapov , porter at the Gromekos ' house, and his daughter Marina (Marinka).

PART ONE

ONE

The Five-O ' Clock Express

 

On they went, singing " Rest Eternal, " and whenever they stopped, their feet, the horses, and the gusts of wind seemed to carry on their singing.

Passers-by made way for the procession, counted the wreaths, and crossed themselves. Some joined in out of curiosity and asked: " Who is being buried? " — " Zhivago, " they were told.— " Oh, I see. That ' s what it is. " — " It isn ' t him. It ' s his wife. " — " Well, it comes to the same thing. May her soul rest in peace. It ' s a fine funeral. "

The last moments slipped by, one by one, irretrievable. " The earth is the Lord ' s and the fullness thereof, the earth and everything that dwells therein. " The priest, with the gesture of a cross, scattered earth over the body of Maria Nikolaievna. They sang " The souls of the righteous. " Then a fearful bustle began. The coffin was closed, nailed, and lowered into the ground. Clods of earth rained on the lid as the grave was hurriedly filled by four spades. A little mound formed. A ten-year-old boy climbed on it. Only the state of stupor and insensibility which is gradually induced by all big funerals could have created the impression that he intended to speak over his mother ' s grave.

He raised his head and from his vantage point absently glanced about the bare autumn landscape and the domes of the monastery. His snub-nosed face became contorted and he stretched out his neck. If a wolf cub had done this, everyone would have thought that it was about to howl. The boy covered his face with his hands and burst into sobs. The wind bearing down on him lashed his hands and face with cold gusts of rain. A man in black with tightly fitting sleeves went up to the grave. This was Nikolai Nikolaievich Vedeniapin, the dead woman ' s brother and the uncle of the weeping boy; a former priest, he had been unfrocked at his own request. He went up to the boy and led him out of the graveyard.

2

They spent the night at the monastery, where Uncle Nikolai was given a room for old times ' sake. It was on the eve of the Feast of the Intercession of the Holy Virgin. The next day they were supposed to travel south to a provincial town on the Volga where Uncle Nikolai worked for the publisher of the local progressive newspaper. They had bought their tickets and their things stood packed in the cell. The station was near by, and they could hear the plaintive hooting of engines shunting in the distance.

It grew very cold that evening. The two windows of the cell were at ground level and looked out on a corner of the neglected kitchen garden, a stretch of the main road with frozen puddles on it, and the part of the churchyard where Maria Nikolaievna had been buried earlier in the day. There was nothing in the kitchen garden except acacia bushes around the walls and a few beds of cabbages, wrinkled and blue with cold. With each blast of wind the leafless acacias danced as if possessed and then lay flat on the path.

During the night the boy, Yura, was wakened by a knocking at the window. The dark cell was mysteriously lit up by a flickering whiteness. With nothing on but his shirt, he ran to the window and pressed his face against the cold glass.

Outside there was no trace of the road, the graveyard, or the kitchen garden, nothing but the blizzard, the air smoking with snow. It was almost as if the snowstorm had caught sight of Yura and, conscious of its power to terrify, roared and howled, doing everything possible to impress him. Turning over and over in the sky, length after length of whiteness unwound over the earth and shrouded it. The blizzard was alone in the world; it had no rival.

When he climbed down from the window sill Yura ' s first impulse was to dress, run outside, and start doing something. He was afraid that the cabbage patch would be buried so that no one could dig it out and that his mother would helplessly sink deeper and deeper away from him into the ground.

Once more it ended in tears. His uncle woke up, spoke to him of Christ, and tried to comfort him, then yawned and stood thoughtfully by the window. Day was breaking. They began to dress.

3

While his mother was alive Yura did not know that his father had abandoned them long ago, leading a dissolute life in Siberia and abroad and squandering the family millions. He was always told that his father was away on business in Petersburg or at one of the big fairs, usually at Irbit.

His mother had always been sickly. When she was found to have consumption she began to go to southern France and northern Italy for treatment. On two occasions Yura went with her. He was often left with strangers, different ones each time. He became accustomed to such changes, and against this untidy background, surrounded with continual mysteries, he took his father ' s absence for granted.

He could remember a time in his early childhood when a large number of things were still known by his family name. There was a Zhivago factory, a Zhivago bank, Zhivago buildings, a Zhivago necktie pin, even a Zhivago cake which was a kind of baba au rhum, and at one time if you said " Zhivago " to your sleigh driver in Moscow, it was as if you had said: " Take me to Timbuctoo! " and he carried you off to a fairy-tale kingdom. You would find yourself transported to a vast, quiet park. Crows settled on the heavy branches of firs, scattering the hoarfrost; their cawing echoed and reechoed like crackling wood. Pure-bred dogs came running across the road out of the clearing from the recently constructed house. Farther on, lights appeared in the gathering dusk.

And then suddenly all that was gone. They were poor.

4

One day in the summer of 1903, Yura was driving across fields in a two-horse open carriage with his Uncle Nikolai. They were on their way to see Ivan Ivanovich Voskoboinikov, a teacher and author of popular textbooks, who lived at Duplyanka, the estate of Kologrivov, a silk manufacturer, and a great patron of the arts.

It was the Feast of the Virgin of Kazan. The harvest was in full swing but, whether because of the feast or because of the midday break, there was not a soul in sight. The half-reaped fields under the glaring sun looked like the half-shorn heads of convicts. Birds were circling overhead. In the hot stillness the heavy-eared wheat stood straight. Neat sheaves rose above the stubble in the distance; if you stared at them long enough they seemed to move, walking along on the horizon like land surveyors taking notes.

" Whose fields are these? " Nikolai Nikolaievich asked Pavel, the publisher ' s odd-job man who sat sideways on the box, shoulders hunched and legs crossed to show that driving was not his regular job. " The landlord ' s or the peasants ' ? "

" These are the master ' s. " Pavel, who was smoking, after a long silence jabbed with the end of his whip in another direction: " And those are the peasants ' !—Get along, " he shouted at the horses, keeping an eye on their tails and haunches like an engineer watching his pressure gauge. The horses were like horses the world over: the shaft horse pulled with the innate honesty of a simple soul while the off horse arched its neck like a swan and seemed to the uninitiated to be an inveterate idler who thought only of prancing in time to the jangling bells.

Nikolai Nikolaievich had with him the proofs of Voskoboinikov ' s book on the land question; the publisher had asked the author to revise it in view of the increasingly strict censorship.

" The people are getting out of hand here, " he told Pavel. " A merchant in a near-by village has had his throat slit and the county stud farm has been burned down. What do you make of it? Any talk of it in your village? "

But evidently Pavel took an even gloomier view than the censor who urged Voskoboinikov to moderate his passionate views on the agrarian problem.

" Talk of it? The peasants have been spoiled—treated too well. That ' s no good for the likes of us. Give the peasants rope and God knows we ' ll all be at each other ' s throats in no time.—Get along, there! "

This was Yura ' s second trip with his uncle to Duplyanka. He thought he remembered the way, and every time the fields spread out, forming a narrow border around the woods, it seemed to him he recognized the place where the road would turn right and disclose briefly a view of the six-mile-long Kologrivov estate, with the river gleaming in the distance and the railway beyond it. But each time he was mistaken. Fields followed fields and were in turn lost in woods. These vast expanses gave him a feeling of freedom and elation. They made him think and dream of the future.

Not one of the books that later made Nikolai Nikolaievich famous was yet written. Although his ideas had taken shape, he did not know how close was their expression. Soon he was to take his place among contemporary writers, university professors, and philosophers of the revolution, a man who shared their ideological concern but had nothing in common with them except their terminology. All of them, without exception, clung to some dogma or other, satisfied with words and superficialities, but Father Nikolai had gone through Tolstoyism and revolutionary idealism and was still moving forward. He passionately sought an idea, inspired, graspable, which in its movement would clearly point the way toward change, an idea like a flash of lightning or a roll of thunder capable of speaking even to a child or an illiterate. He thirsted for something new.

Yura enjoyed being with his uncle. He reminded him of his mother. Like hers, his mind moved with freedom and welcomed the unfamiliar. He had the same aristocratic sense of equality with all living creatures and the same gift of taking in everything at a glance and of expressing his thoughts as they first came to him and before they had lost their meaning and vitality.

Yura was glad that his uncle was taking him to Duplyanka. It was a beautiful place, and this too reminded him of his mother, who had been fond of nature and had often taken him for country walks.

He also looked forward to seeing Nika Dudorov again, though Nika, being two years older, probably despised him. Nika was a schoolboy who lived at the Voskoboinikovs ' ; when he shook hands with Yura, he jerked his arm downwards with all his might and bowed his head so low that his hair flopped over his forehead and hid half his face.

5

" The vital nerve of the problem of pauperism, " Nikolai Nikolaievich read from the revised manuscript.

" Essence would be better, I think, " said Ivan Ivanovich, making the correction on the galleys.

They were working in the half-darkness of the glassed-in veranda. Watering cans and gardening tools lay about, a raincoat was flung over the back of a broken chair, mud-caked hip boots stood in a corner, their uppers collapsed on the floor.

" On the other hand, the statistics of births and deaths show, " dictated Nikolai Nikolaievich.

" Insert ' for the year under review, ' " said Ivan Ivanovich and made a note. There was a slight draft. Pieces of granite lay on the sheets as paperweights.

When they finished Nikolai Nikolaievich wanted to leave at once.

" There ' s a storm coming. We must be off. "

" Nothing of the sort. I won ' t let you. We ' re going to have tea now. "

" But I must be back in town by night. "

" It ' s no use arguing. I won ' t hear of it. "

From the garden, a whiff of charcoal smoke from the samovar drifted in, smothering the smell of tobacco plant and heliotrope. A maid carried out a tray with clotted cream, berries, and cheese cakes. Then they were told that Pavel had gone off to bathe in the river and had taken the horses with him. Nikolai Nikolaievich had to resign himself to staying.

" Let ' s go down to the river while they ' re getting tea ready, " suggested Ivan Ivanovich.

On the strength of his friendship with Kologrivov, he had the use of two rooms in the manager ' s house. The cottage with its own small garden stood in a neglected corner of the park, near the old drive, now thickly overgrown with grass and no longer used except for carting rubbish to the gully, which served as a dump. Kologrivov, a man of advanced views and a millionaire who sympathized with the revolution, was abroad with his wife. Only his two daughters, Nadia and Lipa, with their governess and a small staff of servants, were on the estate.

A thick hedge of blackthorn separated the manager ' s house and garden from the park with its lawns and artificial lakes which surrounded the main house. As Ivan Ivanovich and Nikolai Nikolaievich skirted the hedge, small flocks of sparrows flew out at regular intervals. The blackthorn swarmed with them, and their even chatter accompanied them like water flowing in a pipe.

They passed the hothouses, the gardener ' s cottage, and the ruins of some stone structure. They were talking about new talent in science and literature.

" Yes, there are gifted men, " said Nikolai Nikolaievich; " but the fashion nowadays is all for groups and societies of every sort. Gregariousness is always the refuge of mediocrities, whether they swear by Solovi ë v or Kant or Marx. Only individuals seek the truth, and they shun those whose sole concern is not the truth. How many things in the world deserve our loyalty? Very few indeed. I think one should be loyal to immortality, which is another word for life, a stronger word for it. One must be true to immortality—true to Christ! Ah, you ' re turning up your nose, my poor man. As usual, you haven ' t understood a thing. "

" Hmm, " said Ivan Ivanovich. Thin, fair-haired, restless as an eel, he had a mocking little beard that made him look like an American of Lincoln ' s time: he was always bunching it up in his hand and nibbling the tip. " I say nothing, of course. As you know, I look at these things rather differently. But while we ' re at it, tell me, what was it like when they unfrocked you? I bet you were scared. They didn ' t anathematize you, did they? "

" You ' re trying to change the subject. However, why not.… Anathematize me? No, they don ' t do that any more. It was unpleasant, and there are certain consequences. For instance, one is banned from the civil service for quite a long time, and I was forbidden to go to Moscow or Petersburg. But these are trifles. As I was saying, one must be true to Christ. I ' ll explain. What you don ' t understand is that it is possible to be an atheist, it is possible not to know whether God exists, or why, and yet believe that man does not live in a state of nature but in history, and that history as we know it now began with Christ, and that Christ ' s Gospel is its foundation. Now what is history? It is the centuries of systematic explorations of the riddle of death, with a view to overcoming death. That ' s why people discover mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves, that ' s why they write symphonies. Now, you can ' t advance in this direction without a certain faith. You can ' t make such discoveries without spiritual equipment. And the basic elements of this equipment are in the Gospels. What are they? To begin with, love of one ' s neighbor, which is the supreme form of vital energy. Once it fills the heart of man it has to overflow and spend itself. And then the two basic ideals of modern man—without them he is unthinkable—the idea of free personality and the idea of life as sacrifice. Mind you, all this is still extraordinarily new. There was no history in this sense among the ancients. They had blood and beastliness and cruelty and pockmarked Caligulas who do not suspect how untalented every enslaver is. They had the boastful dead eternity of bronze monuments and marble columns. It was not until after the coming of Christ that time and man could breathe freely. It was not until after Him that men began to live toward the future. Man does not die in a ditch like a dog—but at home in history, while the work toward the conquest of death is in full swing; he dies sharing in this work. Ouf! I got quite worked up, didn ' t I? But I might as well be talking to a blank wall. "

" That ' s metaphysics, my dear fellow. It ' s forbidden by my doctors, my stomach won ' t take it. "

" Oh well, you ' re hopeless. Let ' s leave it. Goodness, what a view, you lucky devil. Though I suppose as you live with it every day you don ' t see it. "

It was hard to keep one ' s eyes on the shimmering river, which, like a sheet of polished metal, reflected the glare of the sun. Suddenly its surface parted in waves. A big ferry loaded with carts, horses, and peasants and their women started for the other shore.

" Just think, it ' s only a little after five, " said Ivan Ivanovich. " There ' s the express from Syzran. It passes here at five past five. "

Far out on the plain, crossing it from right to left, came a neat little yellow and blue train, tiny in the distance. Suddenly they noticed that it had stopped. White puffs of steam flurried over the engine, and then came a prolonged whistle. " That ' s strange, " said Voskoboinikov. " Something ' s wrong. It has no business to stop in the middle of the marsh out there. Something must have happened. Let ' s go and have tea. "

6

Nika was neither in the garden nor in the house. Yura guessed that he was hiding because they bored him, and because Yura was too young for him. When his uncle and Ivan Ivanovich went on the veranda to work, Yura was left to wander aimlessly about the grounds.

How enchanting this place was! Orioles kept making their clear three-note calls, stopping each time just long enough to let the countryside suck in the moist fluting sounds down to the last vibration. A heavy fragrance, motionless, as though having lost its way in the air, was fixed by the heat above the flower beds. This brought back memories of Antibes and Bordighera. Yura turned this way and that. The ghost of his mother ' s voice was hallucinatingly present in the meadows. He heard it in the musical phrases of the birds and the buzzing of the bees. Now and then he imagined with a start that his mother was calling him, asking him to join her somewhere.

He walked to the gully and climbed from the clear coppice at its edge into the alder thicket that covered its bottom.

Down there among the litter of fallen branches it was dark and dank; flowers were few, and the notched stalks of horsetail looked like the staffs with Egyptian ornaments in his illustrated Bible.

Yura felt more and more lonely. He wanted to cry. He slumped to his knees and burst into tears.

" Angel of God, my holy guardian, " he prayed, " keep me firmly on the path of truth and tell Mother I ' m all right, she ' s not to worry. If there is a life after death, O Lord, receive Mother into Your heavenly mansions where the faces of the saints and of the just shine like stars. Mother was so good, she couldn ' t have been a sinner, have mercy on her, Lord, and please don ' t let her suffer. Mother! " —in his heart-rending anguish he called to her as though she were another patron saint, and suddenly, unable to bear any more, fell down unconscious.

He was not unconscious for long. When he came to, he heard his uncle calling him from above. He answered and began to climb. Suddenly he remembered that he had not prayed for his missing father, as Maria Nikolaievna had taught him to.

But his fainting spell had left him with a sense of lightness and well-being that he was unwilling to lose. He thought that nothing terrible would happen if he prayed for his father some other time, as if saying to himself, " Let him wait. " Yura did not remember him at all.

7

In a second-class compartment of the train sat Misha Gordon, who was travelling with his father, a lawyer from Gorenburg. Misha was a boy of eleven with a thoughtful face and big dark eyes; he was in his second year of gymnasium. His father, Grigory Osipovich Gordon, was being transferred to a new post in Moscow. His mother and sisters had gone on some time before to get their apartment ready.

Father and son had been travelling for three days.

Russia, with its fields, steppes, villages, and towns, bleached lime-white by the sun, flew past them wrapped in hot clouds of dust. Lines of carts rolled along the highways, occasionally lumbering off the road to cross the tracks; from the furiously speeding train it seemed that the carts stood still and the horses were marking time.

At big stations passengers jumped out and ran to the buffet; the sun setting behind the station garden lit their feet and shone under the wheels of the train.

Every motion in the world taken separately was calculated and purposeful, but, taken together, they were spontaneously intoxicated with the general stream of life which united them all. People worked and struggled, each set in motion by the mechanism of his own cares. But the mechanisms would not have worked properly had they not been regulated and governed by a higher sense of an ultimate freedom from care. This freedom came from the feeling that all human lives were interrelated, a certainty that they flowed into each other—a happy feeling that all events took place not only on the earth, in which the dead are buried, but also in some other region which some called the Kingdom of God, others history, and still others by some other name.

To this general rule Misha was an unhappy, bitter exception. A feeling of care remained his ultimate mainspring and was not relieved and ennobled by a sense of security. He knew this hereditary trait in himself and watched morbidly and self-consciously for symptoms of it in himself. It distressed him. Its presence humiliated him.

For as long as he could remember he had never ceased to wonder why, having arms and legs like everyone else, and a language and way of life common to all, one could be different from the others, liked only by few and, moreover, loved by no one. He could not understand a situation in which if you were worse than other people you could not make an effort to improve yourself. What did it mean to be a Jew? What was the purpose of it? What was the reward or the justification of this impotent challenge, which brought nothing but grief?

When Misha took the problem to his father he was told that his premises were absurd, and that such reasonings were wrong, but he was offered no solution deep enough to attract him or to make him bow silently to the inevitable.

And making an exception only for his parents, he gradually became contemptuous of all grownups who had made this mess and were unable to clear it up. He was sure that when he was big he would straighten it all out.

Now, for instance, no one had the courage to say that his father should not have run after that madman when he had rushed out onto the platform, and should not have stopped the train when, pushing Grigory Osipovich aside, and flinging open the door, he had thrown himself head first out of the express like a diver from a springboard into a swimming pool.

But since it was his father who had pulled the emergency release, it looked as if the train had stopped for such an inexplicably long time because of them.

No one knew the exact cause of the delay. Some said that the sudden stop had damaged the air brakes, others that they were on a steep gradient and one engine could not make it. A third view was that as the suicide was a prominent person, his lawyer, who had been with him on the train, insisted on officials being called from the nearest station, Kologrivovka, to draw up a statement. This was why the assistant engineer had climbed up the telegraph pole: the inspection handcar must be on its way.

There was a faint stench from the lavatories, not quite dispelled by eau de cologne, and a smell of fried chicken, a little high and wrapped in dirty wax paper. As though nothing had happened, graying Petersburg ladies with creaking chesty voices, turned into gypsies by the combination of soot and cosmetics, powdered their faces and wiped their fingers on their handkerchiefs. When they passed the door of the Gordons ' compartment, adjusting their shawls and anxious about their appearance even while squeezing themselves through the narrow corridor, their pursed lips seemed to Misha to hiss: " Aren ' t we sensitive! We ' re something special. We ' re intellectuals. It ' s too much for us. "

The body of the suicide lay on the grass by the embankment. A little stream of blood had run across his forehead, and, having dried, it looked like a cancel mark crossing out his face. It did not look like his blood, which had come from his body, but like a foreign appendage, a piece of plaster or a splatter of mud or a wet birch leaf.

Curious onlookers and sympathizers surrounded the body in a constantly changing cluster, while his friend and travelling companion, a thickset, arrogant-looking lawyer, a purebred animal in a sweaty shirt, stood over him sullenly with an expressionless face. Overcome by the heat, he was fanning himself with his hat. In answer to all questions he shrugged his shoulders and said crossly without even turning around: " He was an alcoholic. Can ' t you understand? He did it in a fit of D.T. ' s. "

Once or twice a thin old woman in a woollen dress and lace kerchief went up to the body. She was the widow Tiverzina, mother of two engineers, who was travelling third class on a pass with her two daughters-in-law. Like nuns with their mother superior, the two quiet women, their shawls pulled low over their foreheads, followed her in silence. The crowd made way for them.

Tiverzina ' s husband had been burned alive in a railway accident. She stood a little away from the body, where she could see it through the crowd, and sighed as if comparing the two cases. " Each according to his fate, " she seemed to say. " Some die by the Lord ' s will—and look what ' s happened to him—to die of rich living and mental illness. "

All the passengers came out and had a look at the corpse and went back to their compartments only for fear that something might be stolen.

When they jumped out onto the track and picked flowers or took a short walk to stretch their legs, they felt as if the whole place owed its existence to the accident, and that without it neither the swampy meadow with hillocks, the broad river, nor the fine house and church on the steep opposite side would have been there. Even the diffident evening sun seemed to be a purely local feature. Its light probed the scene of the accident timidly, like a cow from a nearby herd come for a moment to take a look at the crowd.

Misha had been deeply shaken by the event and had at first wept with grief and fright. In the course of the long journey the suicide had come several times to their compartment and had talked with Misha ' s father for hours on end. He had said that he found relief in the moral decency, peace, and understanding which he discovered in him and had asked him endless questions about fine points in law concerning bills of exchange, deeds of settlement, bankruptcy, and fraud. " Is that so? " he exclaimed at Gordon ' s answers. " Can the law be as lenient as that? My lawyer takes a much gloomier view. "

Each time that this nervous man calmed down, his travelling companion came from their first-class coach to drag him off to the restaurant to drink champagne. He was the thickset, arrogant, clean-shaven, well-dressed lawyer who now stood over his body, showing not the least surprise. It was hard to escape the feeling that his client ' s ceaseless agitation had somehow been to his advantage.

Misha ' s father described him as a well-known millionaire, Zhivago, a good-natured profligate, not quite responsible for his actions. When he had come to their compartment, he would, unrestrained by Misha ' s presence, talk about his son, a boy of Misha ' s age, and about his late wife; then he would go on about his second family, whom he had deserted as he had the first. At this point he would remember something else, grow pale with terror, and begin to lose the thread of his story.

To Misha he had shown an unaccountable affection, which probably reflected a feeling for someone else. He had showered him with presents, jumping out to buy them at the big stations, where the bookstalls in the first-class waiting rooms also sold toys and local souvenirs.

He had drunk incessantly and complained that he had not slept for three months and that as soon as he sobered up for however short a time he suffered torments unimaginable to any normal human being.

At the end, he rushed into their compartment, grasped Gordon by the hand, tried to tell him something but found he could not, and dashing out onto the platform threw himself from the train.

Now Misha sat examining the small wooden box of minerals from the Urals that had been his last gift. Suddenly there was a general stir. A handcar rolled up on the parallel track. A doctor, two policemen, and a magistrate with a cockade in his hat jumped out. Questions were asked in cold businesslike voices, and notes taken. The policemen and the guards, slipping and sliding awkwardly in the gravel, dragged the corpse up the embankment. A peasant woman began to wail. The passengers were asked to go back to their seats, the guard blew his whistle, and the train started on.

8

" Here ' s old Holy Oil, " Nika thought savagely, looking around the room for a way of escape. The voices of the guests were outside the door, and retreat was cut off. The room had two beds, his own and Voskoboinikov ' s. With scarcely a moment ' s thought he crept under the first.

He could hear them calling and looking for him in other rooms, surprised at his absence. Finally they entered the bedroom.

" Well, it can ' t be helped, " said Nikolai Nikolaievich. " Run along, Yura. Perhaps your friend will turn up later and you can play with him then. " They sat talking about the student riots in Petersburg and Moscow, keeping Nika in his absurd and undignified confinement for about twenty minutes. At last they went out onto the veranda. Nika quietly opened the window, jumped out, and went off into the park.

He had had no sleep the night before and was out of sorts. He was in his fourteenth year and was sick and tired of being a child. He had stayed awake all night and had gone out at dawn. The rising sun had cast the long dewy shadows of trees in loops over the park grounds. The shadow was not black but dark gray like wet felt. The heady fragrance of the morning seemed to come from this damp shadow on the ground, with strips of light in it like a girl ' s fingers.

Suddenly a streak of quicksilver, as shiny as the dew on the grass, flowed by him a few paces away. It flowed on and on and the ground did not absorb it. Then, with an unexpectedly sharp movement, it swerved aside and vanished. It was a grass snake. Nika shuddered.

He was a strange boy. When he was excited he talked aloud to himself, imitating his mother ' s predilection for lofty subjects and paradox.

" How wonderful to be alive, " he thought. " But why does it always hurt? God exists, of course. But if He exists, then it ' s me. " He looked up at an aspen shaking from top to bottom, its wet leaves like bits of tinfoil. " I ' ll order it to stop. " With an insane intensity of effort, he willed silently with his whole being, with every ounce of his flesh and blood: " Be still, " and the tree at once obediently froze into immobility. Nika laughed with joy and ran off to the river to bathe.

His father, the terrorist Dementii Dudorov, condemned to death by hanging but reprieved by the Tsar, was now doing forced labor. His mother was a Georgian princess of the Eristov family, a spoiled and beautiful woman, still young and always infatuated with one thing or another—rebellions, rebels, extremist theories, famous actors, unhappy failures.

She adored Nika, turning his name, Innokentii, into a thousand impossibly tender and silly nicknames such as Inochek or Nochenka, and took him to Tiflis to show him off to her family. There, what struck him most was a straggly tree in the courtyard of their house. It was a clumsy, tropical giant, with leaves like elephant ' s ears which sheltered the yard from the scorching southern sky. Nika could not get used to the idea that it was a plant and not an animal.

It was dangerous for the boy to bear his father ' s terrible name. Ivan Ivanovich wished him to adopt his mother ' s and intended, with her consent, to petition the Tsar for permission to make the change. When lying under the bed, indignant at all the world, he had thought among other things of this. Who did Voskoboinikov think he was to meddle so outrageously with his life? He ' d teach him where he got off.

And that Nadia! Just because she was fifteen, did that give her the right to turn up her nose and talk down to him as if he were a child? He ' d show her! " I hate her, " he said several times to himself. " I ' ll kill her. I ' ll take her out in the boat and drown her. "

His mother was a fine one, too. Of course she ' d lied to him and Voskoboinikov when she went away. She hadn ' t gone anywhere near the Caucasus, she had simply turned around at the nearest junction and gone north to Petersburg, and was now having a lovely time with the students shooting at the police, while he was supposed to rot alive in this silly dump. But he ' d outsmart them all. He ' d kill Nadia, quit school, run away to his father in Siberia, and start a rebellion.

The pond had water lilies all around the edge. The boat cut into this growth with a dry rustle; the pond water showed through like juice in a watermelon where a sample wedge has been cut out.

Nika and Nadia were picking the lilies. They both took hold of the same tough rubbery stem; it pulled them together, so that their heads bumped, and the boat was dragged in to shore as by a boathook. There the stems were shorter and more tangled; the white flowers, with their glowing centers looking like blood-specked egg yolks, sank and emerged dripping with water.

Nadia and Nika kept on picking flowers, tipping the boat more and more, lying in it almost side by side.

" I ' m sick of school, " said Nika. " It ' s time I began my life—time I went out into the world and earned my living. "

" And I meant to ask you about square root equations. My algebra is so bad I nearly had to take another exam. "

Nika thought there was a hidden barb in those words. Naturally, she was putting him in his place, reminding him he was a baby. Square root equations! Why, he hadn ' t even begun algebra.

Feigning indifference to conceal his feelings, he asked, realizing at the same moment how silly it was: " Whom will you marry when you ' re grown up? "

" That ' s a very long way off. Probably no one. I haven ' t thought about it. "

" I hope you don ' t think I ' m interested. "

" Then why do you ask? "

" You ' re stupid. "

They began to quarrel. Nika remembered his early morning misogyny. He threatened to drown her if she didn ' t stop calling him names. " Just try, " said Nadia. He grabbed her around the waist. They fought, lost their balance, and fell in.

They could both swim, but the lilies caught at their arms and legs and they were out of their depth. Finally, wading through the sticky mud, they climbed out, water streaming from their shoes and pockets. Nika was the more exhausted of the two.

They were sitting side by side, drenched to the skin. No later than last spring, after such an adventure, they would have shouted, cursed, or laughed. But now they were silent, catching their breath, overcome by the absurdity of the whole thing. Nadia seethed with inner indignation, and Nika ached all over, as if someone had beaten him with a club and cracked his ribs.

In the end Nadia said quietly, like an adult: " You really are mad, " and Nika said in an equally adult tone: " I ' m sorry. "

They walked home dripping water like two water carts. Their way took them up the dusty slope swarming with snakes near the place where Nika had seen the grass snake that morning.

He remembered the magic elation that had filled him in the night, and his omnipotence at dawn when nature obeyed his will. What order should he give it now, he wondered. What was his dearest wish? It struck him that what he wanted most was to fall into the pond again with Nadia, and he would have given much to know if this would ever happen.

TWO

A Girl from a Different World

 

The war with Japan was not yet over when it was unexpectedly overshadowed by other events. Waves of revolution swept across Russia, each greater and more extraordinary than the last.

It was at this time that Amalia Karlovna Guishar, the widow of a Belgian engineer and herself a Russianized Frenchwoman, arrived in Moscow from the Urals with her two children—her son Rodion and her daughter Larisa. She placed her son in the military academy and her daughter in a girls ' gymnasium, where, as it happened, Nadia Kologrivova was her classmate.

Madame Guishar ' s husband had left her his savings, stocks which had been rising and were now beginning to fall. To stop the drain on her resources and to have something to do she bought a small business; this was Levitskaia ' s dressmaking establishment near the Triumphal Arch; she took it over from Levitskaia ' s heirs together with the firm ' s good will, its clientele, and all its seamstresses and apprentices.

This she did on the advice of Komarovsky, a lawyer who had been a friend of her husband ' s and was now the man to whom she turned for counsel and help, a cold-blooded businessman who knew the Russian business world like the back of his hand. It was with him that she had arranged her move by correspondence; he had met her and the children at the station and had driven them to the other end of Moscow, to the Montenegro Hotel in Oruzheiny Pereulok, where he had booked their room. He had also persuaded her to send Rodia to the military academy and Lara to the school of his choice. He joked carelessly with the boy and stared at the girl so that he made her blush.

2

They stayed about a month at the Montenegro before moving into the small three-room apartment adjoining the workshop.

This was the most disreputable part of Moscow—slums, cheap bars frequented by cabmen, [1] whole streets devoted to vice, dens of " fallen women. "

The children were not surprised by the dirt in the rooms, the bedbugs, and the wretchedness of the furniture. Since their father ' s death their mother had lived in constant fear of destitution. Rodia and Lara were used to being told that they were on the verge of ruin. They realized that they were different from the children of the street, but, like children brought up in an orphanage, they had a deep-seated fear of the rich.

Their mother was a living example of this fear. Madame Guishar was a plump blonde of about thirty-five subject to spells of palpitation alternating with her fits of silliness. She was a dreadful coward and was terrified of men. For this very reason, out of fear and confusion, she drifted continually from lover to lover.

At the Montenegro the family lived in Room 23: Room 24, ever since the Montenegro had been founded, had been occupied by the cellist Tyshkevich, a bald, sweaty, kindly man in a wig who joined his hands prayerfully and pressed them to his breast when he was trying to be persuasive, and who threw back his head and rolled his eyes in ecstasy when he played at fashionable parties and concert halls. He was rarely in, spending whole days at the Bolshoi Theater or the Conservatory. As neighbors they helped each other out, and this brought them together.

Since the presence of the children sometimes embarrassed Madame Guishar during Komarovsky ' s visits, Tyshkevich would leave her his key so that she could receive her friend in his room. Soon she took his altruism so much for granted that on several occasions she knocked on his door asking him in tears to protect her from her benefactor.

3

The workshop was in a one-story house near the corner of Tverskaia Street. Near by was the Brest railway with its engine depots, warehouses, and lodgings for the employees.

In one of them lived Olia Demina, a clever girl who worked at Madame Guishar ' s and whose uncle was employed at the freight yard.

She was a quick apprentice. She had been singled out by the former owner of the workshop and was now beginning to be favored by the new one. Olia had a great liking for Lara Guishar.

Nothing had changed since Levitskaia ' s day. The sewing machines whirred frantically under the tread of tired seamstresses or their flitting hands. Here and there a woman sat on a table sewing quietly with a broad sweep of the arm as she pulled the needle and long thread. The floor was littered with scraps. You had to raise your voice to make yourself heard above the clatter of the machines and the modulated trills of Kirill Modestovich, the canary in its cage in the window (the former owner had carried with her to the grave the secret of the bird ' s improbable name).

In the reception room the customers clustered in a picturesque group around a table heaped with fashion magazines. Standing, sitting, or bending over the table in the poses they had seen in the pictures, they discussed models and patterns. In the manager ' s chair at another table sat Faina Silantievna Fetisova, Madame Guishar ' s assistant and senior cutter, a bony woman with warts in the hollows of her flabby cheeks. A cigarette in a bone holder clamped between her yellowed teeth, squinting her yellowish eyes and blowing a stream of yellow smoke from her nose and mouth, she jotted in a notebook the measurements, orders and addresses, and requests of the thronging clients.

Madame Guishar had no experience of running a workshop. She felt that she was not quite the boss, but the staff were honest and Fetisova was reliable. All the same, these were troubled times and she was afraid to think of the future; she had moments of paralyzing despair.

Komarovsky often went to see them. As he walked through the workshop on his way to their apartment, startling the fashionable ladies at their fittings so that they darted behind the screens playfully parrying his ambiguous jokes, the seamstresses, disapproving, muttered sneeringly: " Here comes his lordship, " " Amalia ' s heartache, " " old goat, " " lady-killer. "

An object of even greater hatred was his bulldog Jack; he sometimes took it with him on a lead on which it pulled with such violent jerks that Komarovsky followed stumbling and lurching with outstretched hands like a blind man after his guide.

One spring day Jack sank his teeth in Lara ' s leg and tore her stocking.

" I ' ll kill that demon, " Olia whispered hoarsely into Lara ' s ear.

" Yes, it really is a horrid dog; but how can you do that, silly? "

" Ssh, don ' t talk so loud, I ' ll tell you. You know those stone Easter eggs—the ones on your Mama ' s chest of drawers.… "

" Well, yes, they ' re made of glass and marble. "

" That ' s it. Bend down and I ' ll whisper. You take them and dip them in lard—the filthy beast will guzzle them and choke himself, the devil. That ' ll do it. "

Lara laughed and thought of Olia with envy. Here was a working girl who lived in poverty. Such children were precocious. Yet how unspoiled and childlike she was! Jack, the eggs—where on earth did she get all her ideas? " And why is it, " thought Lara, " that my fate is to see everything and take it all so much to heart? "

4

" Mother is his—what ' s the word…He ' s Mother ' s…They ' re bad words, I won ' t say them. Then why does he look at me like that? I ' m her daughter, after all. "

Lara was only a little over sixteen but she was well developed. People thought she was eighteen or more. She had a good mind and was easy to get along with. She was very good-looking.

She and Rodia realized that nothing in life would come to them without a struggle. Unlike the idle and well-to-do, they did not have the leisure for premature curiosity and theorizing about things that were not yet practical concerns. Only the superfluous is sordid. Lara was the purest being in the world.

Brother and sister knew the value of things and appreciated what they had achieved so far. People had to think well of you if you were to get on. Lara worked well at school, not because she had an abstract love of learning but because only the best pupils were given scholarships. She was just as good at washing dishes, helping out in the workshop, and doing her mother ' s errands. She moved with a silent grace, and all her features—voice, figure, gestures, her gray eyes and her fair hair—formed a harmonious whole.

It was a Sunday in the middle of July. On holidays you could stay in bed a little longer. Lara lay on her back, her hands clasped behind her head.

The workshop was quiet. The window looking out on the street was open. Lara heard the rattle of a droshki in the distance turn into a smooth glide as the wheels left the cobbles for the groove of a trolley track. " I ' ll sleep a bit more, " she thought. The rumble of the town was like a lullaby and made her sleepy.

Lara felt her size and her position in the bed with two points of her body—the salient of her left shoulder and the big toe of her right foot. Everything else was more or less herself, her soul or inner being, harmoniously fitted into her contours and impatiently straining toward the future.

" I must go to sleep, " thought Lara, and conjured up in her imagination the sunny side of Coachmakers ' Row as it must be at this hour—the enormous carriages displayed on the cleanly swept floors of the coachmakers ' sheds, the lanterns of cut glass, the stuffed bears, the rich life. And a little farther down the street, the dragoons exercising in the yard of the Znamensky barracks—the chargers mincing in a circle, the men vaulting into the saddles and riding past, at a walk, at a trot, and at a gallop, and outside, the row of children with nannies and wet-nurses gaping through the railings.

And a little farther still, thought Lara, Petrovka Street. " Good heavens, Lara, what an idea! I just wanted to show you my apartment. We ' re so near. "

It was the name day of Olga, the small daughter of some friends of Komarovsky ' s who lived in Coachmakers ' Row. The grownups were celebrating the occasion with dancing and champagne. He had invited Mother, but Mother couldn ' t go, she wasn ' t feeling well. Mother said: " Take Lara. You ' re always telling me to look after Lara. Well, now you look after her. " And look after her he did—what a joke!

It was all this waltzing that had started it. What a crazy business it was! You spun round and round, thinking of nothing. While the music played, a whole eternity went by like life in a novel. But as soon as it stopped you had a feeling of shock, as if a bucket of cold water were splashed over you or somebody had found you undressed. Of course, one reason why you allowed anyone to be so familiar was just to show how grown-up you were.

She could never have imagined that he danced so well. What clever hands he had, what assurance as he gripped you by the waist! But never again would she allow anyone to kiss her like that. She could never have dreamed there could be so much effrontery in anyone ' s lips when they were pressed for such a long time against your own.

She must stop all this nonsense. Once and for all. Stop playing at being shy, simpering and lowering her eyes—or it would end in disaster. There loomed an imperceptible, a terrifying border-line. One step and you would be hurtled into an abyss. She must stop thinking about dancing. That was the root of the evil. She must boldly refuse—pretend that she had never learned to dance or that she ' d broken her leg.

5

That autumn there was unrest among the railway workers on the Moscow network. The men on the Moscow-Kazan line went on strike, and those of the Moscow-Brest line were expected to join them. The decision to strike had been taken, but the strike committee was still arguing about the date. Everyone on the railway knew that a strike was coming and only a pretext was needed for it to begin.

It was a cold overcast morning at the beginning of October, and on that day the wages were due. For a long time nothing was heard from the bookkeeping department; then a boy came into the office with a pay sheet and a pile of records that had been consulted for the deduction of fines. The cashier began handing out the pay. In an endless line, conductors, switchmen, mechanics and their assistants, scrubwomen from the depot, moved across the ground between the wooden buildings of the management and the station with its workshops, warehouses, engine sheds, and tracks.

The air smelled of early winter in town—of trampled maple leaves, melted snow, engine soot, and warm rye bread just out of the oven (it was baked in the basement of the station buffet). Trains came and went. They were shunted, coupled, and uncoupled to the waving of furled and unfurled signal flags. Locomotives hooted, guards tooted their horns, and shunters blew their whistles. Smoke rose in endless ladders to the sky. Hissing engines scalded the cold winter clouds with clouds of boiling steam.

Fuflygin, the Divisional Manager, and Pavel Ferapontovich Antipov, the Track Overseer of the station area, walked up and down along the edge of the tracks. Antipov had been pestering the repair shops about the quality of the spare parts for mending the tracks. The steel was not sufficiently tensile, the rails failed the test for strains, and Antipov thought that they would crack in the frosty weather. The management merely shelved his complaints. Someone was making money on the contracts.

Fuflygin wore an expensive fur coat on which the piping of the railway uniform had been sewn; it was unbuttoned, showing his new civilian serge suit. He stepped cautiously on the embankment, glancing down with pleasure at the line of his lapels, the straight creases on his trousers, and his elegant shoes. What Antipov was saying came in one ear and went out the other. Fuflygin had his own thoughts; he kept taking out his watch and looking at it; he was in a hurry to be off.

" Quite right, quite right, my dear fellow, " he broke in impatiently, " but that ' s only dangerous on the main lines with a lot of traffic. But just look at what you ' ve got. Sidings and dead ends, nettles and dandelions. And the traffic—at most an old shunting engine for sorting the empties. What more do you want? You must be out of your mind! Talk about steel—wooden rails would do here! "

Fuflygin looked at his watch, snapped the lid, and gazed into the distance where a road ran toward the railway. A carriage came into sight at a bend of the road. This was Fuflygin ' s own turnout. His wife had come for him. The coachman drew in the horses almost at the edge of the tracks, talking to them in a high-pitched womanish voice, like a nursemaid scolding fretful children; they were frightened of trains. In a corner of the carriage sat a pretty woman negligently leaning against the cushions.

" Well, my good fellow, some other time, " said the Divisional Manager with a wave of the hand, as much as to say, " I ' ve got more important things than rails to think about. " The couple drove off.

6

Three or four hours later, almost at dusk, in a field some distance from the track, where no one had been visible until then, two figures rose out of the ground and, looking back over their shoulders, quickly walked away.

" Let ' s walk faster, " said Tiverzin. " I ' m not worried about spies following us, but the moment those slowpokes in their hole in the ground have finished they ' ll come out and catch up with us. I can ' t bear the sight of them. What ' s the point of having a committee if you drag things out like that? You play with fire and then you duck for shelter. You ' re a fine one yourself—siding with that lot. "

" My Daria ' s got typhus. I ought to be taking her to the hospital. Until I ' ve done that I can ' t think about anything else. "

" They say the wages are being paid today. I ' ll go around to the office. If it wasn ' t payday I ' d chuck the lot of you, honest to God I would. I ' d stop all this myself, I wouldn ' t wait a minute. "

" And how would you do that, if I may ask? "

" Nothing to it. I ' d go down to the boiler room and blow the whistle. That ' s all. "

They said goodbye and went off in different directions.

Tiverzin walked across the tracks toward the town. He ran into people coming from the office with their pay. There were a great many of them. By the look of it he reckoned that nearly all the station workers had been paid.

It was getting dark, the lights were on in the office. Idle workers crowded in the square outside it. In the driveway stood Fuflygin ' s carriage and in it sat Fuflygin ' s wife, still in the same pose as though she had not moved since morning. She was waiting for her husband, who was getting his money.

Suddenly sleet began to fall. The coachman climbed down from his box to put up the leather hood. While he tugged at the stiff struts, one leg braced against the back of the carriage, Fuflygin sat admiring the silver beads of sleet glittering in the light of the office lamps; her unblinking dreamy eyes were fixed on a point above the heads of the workers in a manner suggesting that her glance could, in case of need, go through them as through sleet or mist.

Tiverzin caught sight of her expression. It gave him a turn. He walked past without greeting her and decided to call for his wages later, so as not to run into her husband at the office. He crossed over to the darker side of the square, toward the workshops and the black shape of the turntable with tracks fanning out from it toward the depot.

" Tiverzin! Kuprik! " Several voices called out of the darkness. There was a little crowd outside the workshops. Inside, someone was yelling and a boy was crying. " Do go in and help that boy, Kuprian Savelievich, " said a woman in the crowd.

As usual, the old foreman, Piotr Khudoleiev, was walloping his young apprentice Yusupka.

Khudoleiev had not always been a tormentor of apprentices and a brawling drunkard. There had been a time when, as a dashing young workman, he had attracted the admiring glances of merchants ' and priests ' daughters in Moscow ' s industrial suburbs. But the girl he courted, Marfa, who had graduated that year from the diocesan convent school, had turned him down and had married his comrade, the mechanic Savelii Nikitich, Tiverzin ' s father.

Five years after Savelii ' s horrible end (he was burned to death in the sensational railway crash of 1888) Khudoleiev renewed his suit, but again Marfa Gavrilovna rejected him. So Khudoleiev took to drink and rowdiness, trying to get even with a world which was to blame, so he believed, for all his misfortunes.

Yusupka was the son of Gimazetdin, the janitor at the block of tenements where Tiverzin lived. Tiverzin had taken the boy under his wing, and this added fuel to Khudoleiev ' s hostility.

" Is that the way to hold a file, you Asiatic? " bellowed Khudoleiev, dragging Yusupka by the hair and pummelling the back of his neck. " Is that the way to strip down a casting, you slit-eyed Tartar? "

" Ouch, I won ' t do it any more, mister, ow, I won ' t do it any more, ouch, it hurts! "

" He ' s been told a thousand times: first adjust the mandrel and then screw up the chuck, but no, he must do it his own way! Nearly broke the spindle, the bastard. "

" I didn ' t touch the spindle, honest I didn ' t. "

" Why do you tyrannize the boy? " asked Tiverzin, elbowing his way through the crowd.

" It ' s none of your business, " Khudoleiev snapped.

" I ' m asking you why you tyrannize the boy. "

" And I ' m telling you to move off before there ' s trouble, you socialist meddler. Killing ' s too good for him, such scum, he nearly broke my spindle. He should thank his lucky stars he ' s still alive, the slit-eyed devil—all I did was tweak his ears and pull his hair a bit. "

" So you think he should be beheaded for this. You ought to be ashamed of yourself, really, an old foreman like you—you ' ve got gray hair but you still haven ' t learned sense. "

" Move on, move on, I tell you, while you ' re still in one piece. I ' ll knock the stuffing out of you, preaching at me, you dog ' s arse. You were made on the tracks, you jellyfish, under your father ' s very nose. I know your mother, the slut, the mangy cat, the crumpled skirt! "

What happened next was over in a minute. Both men seized the first thing that came to hand on the lathe benches where heavy tools and pieces of iron were lying about, and would have killed each other if the crowd had not rushed in to separate them. Khudoleiev and Tiverzin stood with their heads bent down, their foreheads almost touching, pale, with bloodshot eyes. They were so angry that they could not utter a word. They were held firmly, their arms gripped from behind. Once or twice they tried to break free, twisting their bodies and dragging their comrades who were hanging on to them. Hooks and buttons went flying, their jackets and shirts slipped off, baring their shoulders. Around them was a ceaseless uproar.

" The chisel! Take the chisel away from him, he ' ll smash his head in. Easy now, easy now, Piotr old man, or we ' ll break your arm! What are we playing around with them for! Drag them apart and put them under lock and key and there ' s an end to it. "

With a superhuman effort Tiverzin suddenly shook off the men who clung to him and, breaking loose, dashed to the door. They started after him but, seeing that he had changed his mind, left him alone. He went out, slamming the door, and marched off without turning around. The damp autumn night closed in on him. " You try to help them and they come at you with a knife, " he muttered, striding on unconscious of his direction.

This world of ignominy and fraud, in which an overfed lady had the impertinence to stare right through a crowd of working-men and where a drink-sodden victim of such an order found pleasure in torturing his comrades—this world was now more hateful to him than ever before. He hurried on as though his pace might hasten the time when everything on earth would be as rational and harmonious as it was now inside his feverish head. He knew that all their struggles in the last few days, the troubles on the line, the speeches at meetings, the decision to strike—not carried out yet but at least not cancelled—were separate stages on the great road lying ahead of them.

But at the moment he was so worked up that he wanted to run all the way without stopping to draw breath. He did not realize where he was going with his long strides, but his feet knew very well where they were taking him.

It was not until much later that Tiverzin learned of the decision, taken by the strike committee after he had left the underground shelter with Antipov, to begin the strike that very night. They decided then and there which of them was to go where and which men would be called out. At the moment when the whistle of the engine repair shop blew, as though coming from the very depths of Tiverzin ' s soul, hoarsely at first and then gradually clearing, a crowd was already moving from the depot and the freight yard. Soon it was joined by the men from the boiler room, who had downed tools at Tiverzin ' s signal.

For many years Tiverzin thought that it was he alone who had stopped work and traffic on the line that night. Only much later, at the trial, when he was charged with complicity in the strike but not with inciting it, did he learn the truth.

People ran out asking: " Where is everybody going? What ' s the signal for? " — " You ' re not deaf, " came from the darkness. " It ' s a fire. They ' re sounding the alarm. They want us to put it out. " — " Where ' s the fire? " — " There must be a fire or they wouldn ' t be sounding the alarm. "

Doors banged, more people came out. Other voices were heard. " Fire? Listen to the ignorant lout! It ' s a strike, that ' s what it is, see? Let them get some other fools to do their dirty work. Let ' s go, boys. "

More and more people joined the crowd. The railway workers were on strike.

7

Tiverzin went home two days later, unshaven, drawn with lack of sleep, and chilled to the bone. Frost, unusual at this time of year, had set in the night before, and Tiverzin was not dressed for winter. The janitor, Gimazetdin, met him at the gate.

" Thank you, Mr. Tiverzin, " he babbled in broken Russian. " You didn ' t let Yusupka come to harm. I will always pray for you. "

" You ' re crazy, Gimazetdin, who ' re you calling Mister? Cut it out and say what you have to say quickly, you see how cold it is. "

" Why should you be cold? You will soon be warm, Kuprian Savelich. Me and your mother Marfa Gavrilovna brought a whole shedful of wood from the freight station yesterday—all birch—good, dry wood. "

" Thanks, Gimazetdin. If there ' s something else you want to tell me let ' s have it quickly. I ' m frozen. "

" I wanted to tell you not to spend the night at home, Savelich. You must hide. The police have been here asking who comes to the house. Nobody comes, I said, my relief comes, I said, the people from the railway but no strangers come, I said, not on your life. "

Tiverzin was unmarried and lived with his mother and his younger married brother. The tenements belonged to the neighboring Church of the Holy Trinity. Among the lodgers were some of the clergy and two artels, or associations, of street hawkers—one of butchers, the other of greengrocers—but most of them were workers on the Moscow-Brest railway.

It was a stone house. All around the dirty and unpaved courtyard ran a wooden passageway. Out of it rose a number of dirty, slippery outside staircases, reeking of cats and cabbage. On the landings were privies and padlocked storerooms.

Tiverzin ' s brother had fought as a conscript in the war and had been wounded at Wafangkou. Now he was convalescing at the military hospital in Krasnoyarsk, and his wife and two daughters had gone there to see him and to bring him home (the Tiverzins, hereditary railway workers, travelled all over Russia on official passes). The flat was quiet; only Tiverzin and his mother lived in it at present.

It was on the second floor. On the landing outside there was a water butt, filled regularly by the water carrier. Tiverzin noticed as he came up that the lid of the butt had been pushed sideways and a tin mug stood on the frozen surface of the water. " Prov must have been here, " he thought, grinning. " The way that man drinks, his guts must be on fire, " Prov Afanasievich Sokolov, the church psalmist, was a relative of Tiverzin ' s mother.

Tiverzin jerked the mug out of the ice and pulled the handle of the doorbell. A wave of warm air and appetizing vapors from the kitchen came out to him.

" You ' ve got a good fire going, Mother. It ' s nice and warm in here. "

His mother flung herself on his neck and burst into tears. He stroked her head and, after a while, gently pushed her aside.

" Nothing ventured, nothing won, Mother, " he said softly. " The line ' s struck from Moscow to Warsaw. "

" I know, that ' s why I ' m crying. They ' ll be after you, Kuprinka, you ' ve got to get away. "

" That nice boy friend of yours, Piotr, nearly broke my head! " He meant to make her laugh but she said earnestly: " It ' s a sin to laugh at him, Kuprinka. You should be sorry for him, the poor wretch, the drunkard. "

" Antipov ' s been arrested. They came in the night, searched his flat, turned everything upside down, and took him away this morning. And his wife Daria ' s in hospital with the typhus. And their kid, Pasha, who ' s at the Realgymnasium, is alone in the house with his deaf aunt. And they ' re going to be evicted. I think we should have the boy to stay with us. What did Prov want? "

" How did you know he came? "

" I saw the water butt was uncovered and the mug on the ice—sure to have been Prov guzzling water, I said to myself. "

" How sharp you are, Kuprinka. Yes, he ' s been here. Prov—Prov Afanasievich. Came to borrow some logs—I gave him some. But what am I talking about, fool that I am. It went clean out of my head—the news Prov brought. Think of it, Kuprinka! The Tsar has signed a manifesto and everything ' s to be changed—everybody ' s to be treated right, the peasants are to have land, and we ' re all going to be equal with the gentry! It ' s actually signed, he says, it ' s only got to be made public. The Synod ' s sent something to be put into the Church service, a prayer of thanks or something. He told me what it was, but I ' ve forgotten. "

8

Pasha Antipov, whose father had been arrested as one of the organizers of the strike, went to live with the Tiverzins. He was a clean, tidy boy with regular features and red hair parted in the middle: he was always slicking it down with a brush " and straightening his tunic or the school buckle on his belt. He had a great sense of humor and an unusual gift of observation and kept everyone in fits with his clever imitations of everything he heard and saw.

Soon after the manifesto of October 17th several revolutionary organizations called for a big demonstration. The route was from the Tver Gate to the Kaluga Gate at the other end of the town. But this was a case of too many cooks spoiling the broth. The planners quarrelled and one after the other withdrew from participation. Then, learning that crowds had nevertheless gathered on the appointed morning, they hastily sent representatives to lead the demonstrators.

In spite of Tiverzin ' s efforts to dissuade her, his mother joined the demonstrators, and the gay and sociable Pasha went with her.

It was a dry frosty November day with a still, leaden sky and a few snowflakes coming down one by one. They spun slowly and hesitantly before settling on the pavement like fluffy gray dust.

Down the street people came pouring in a torrent—faces, faces, faces, quilted winter coats and sheepskin hats, men and women students, old men, children, railwaymen in uniform, workers from the trolley depot and the telephone exchange in knee boots and leather jackets, girls and schoolboys.

For some time they sang the " Marseillaise, " the " Varshavianka, " and " Victims You Fell. " Then a man who had been walking backwards at the head of the procession, singing and conducting with his cap, which he used as a baton, turned around, put his cap on his head, and listened to what the other leaders around him were saying. The singing broke off in disorder. Now you could hear the crunch of innumerable footsteps on the frozen pavement.

The leaders had received a message from sympathizers that Cossacks were waiting to ambush the procession farther down the street. The warning had been given by telephone to a near-by pharmacy.

" What of it? " said the organizers. " We must keep calm and not lose our heads, that ' s the main thing. We must occupy the first public building we come to, warn the people, and scatter. "

An argument began about the best building to go to. Some suggested the Society of Commercial Employees, others the Technical School, and still others the School of Foreign Correspondence.

While they were still arguing they reached the corner of a school building, which offered shelter every bit as good as those that had been mentioned.

When they drew level with the entrance the leaders turned aside, climbed the steps of the semicircular porch, and motioned the head of the procession to halt. The doors opened and the procession—coat to coat and cap to cap—moved into the entrance hall and up the stairs.

" The auditorium, the auditorium, " shouted a few voices in the rear, but the crowd continued to press forward, scattering down corridors and straying into the classrooms. When the leaders at last succeeded in shepherding it into the auditorium, they tried several times to warn it of the ambush, but no one listened to them. Stopping and going inside a building were taken as an invitation to an impromptu meeting, which in fact began at once.

After all the walking and singing people were glad to sit quietly for a while and let others do their work for them, shouting themselves hoarse. The crowd, welcoming the rest, overlooked the minor differences between the speakers, who agreed on all essential points. In the end it was the worst orator of the lot who received the most applause. People made no effort to follow him and merely roared approval at his every word, no one minding the interruptions and everyone agreeing out of impatience to everything he said. There were shouts of " Shame, " a telegram of protest was drafted, and suddenly the crowd, bored with the speaker ' s droning voice, stood up as one man and forgetting all about him poured out in a body—cap to cap and row after row—down the stairs and out into the street. The procession was resumed.

While the meeting was on, it had begun to snow. The street was white. The snow fell thicker and thicker.

When the dragoons charged, the marchers at the rear first knew nothing of it. A swelling noise rolled back to them as of great crowds shouting " Hurrah, " and individual screams of " Help! " and " Murder " were lost in the uproar. Almost at the same moment, and borne, as it were, on this wave of sound along the narrow corridor that formed as the crowd divided, the heads and manes of horses, and their saber-swinging riders, rode by swiftly and silently.

Half a platoon galloped through, turned, re-formed, and cut into the tail of the procession. The massacre began.

A few minutes later the avenue was almost deserted. People were scattering down the side streets. The snow was lighter. The afternoon was dry like a charcoal sketch. Then the sun, setting behind the houses, pointed as though with a finger at everything red in the street—the red tops of the dragoons ' caps, a red flag trailing on the ground, and the red specks and threads of blood on the snow.

A groaning man with a split skull was crawling along the curb. From the far end of the street to which the chase had taken them several dragoons were riding back abreast at a walk. Almost at the horses ' feet Marfa Tiverzina, her shawl knocked to the back of her head, was running from side to side screaming wildly: " Pasha! Pasha! "

Pasha had been with her all along, amusing her by cleverly mimicking the last speaker at the meeting, but had vanished suddenly in the confusion when the dragoons charged.

A blow from a nagaika had fallen on her back, and though she had hardly felt it through her thickly quilted coat she swore and shook her fist at the retreating horsemen, indignant that they had dared to strike an old woman like herself, and in public at that.

Looking anxiously from side to side, she had the luck finally to spot the boy across the street. He stood in a recess between a grocer ' s shop and a private stone house, where a group of chance passers-by had been hemmed in by a horseman who had mounted the sidewalk. Amused by their terror, the dragoon was making his horse perform volts and pirouettes, backing it into the crowd and making it rear slowly as in a circus turn. Suddenly he saw his comrades riding back, spurred his mount, and in a couple of bounds took his place in the file.

The crowd dispersed and Pasha, who had been too frightened to utter a sound, rushed to Marfa Gavrilovna.

The old woman grumbled all the way home. " Accursed murderers! People are happy because the Tsar has given them freedom, but these damned killers can ' t stand it. They must spoil everything, twist every word inside out. "

She was furious with the dragoons, furious with the whole world, and at the moment even with her own son. When she was in a temper it seemed to her that all the recent troubles were the fault of " Kuprinka ' s bunglers and fumblers, " as she called them.

" What do they want, the half-wits? They don ' t know themselves, just so long as they can make mischief, the vipers. Like that chatterbox. Pasha dear, show me again how he went on, show me, darling. Oh! I ' ll die laughing. You ' ve got him to the life. Buzz, buzz, buzz—a real bumblebee! "

At home she fell to scolding her son. Was she of an age to have a curly-headed oaf on a horse belt her on her behind?

" Really, Mother, who d ' you take me for? You ' d think I was the Cossack captain or the Chief of Police. "

9

Nikolai Nikolaievich saw the fleeing demonstrators from his window. He realized who they were and watched to see if Yura were among them. But none of his friends seemed to be there though he thought that he had caught sight of the Dudorov boy—he could not quite remember his name—that desperado who had so recently had a bullet extracted from his shoulder and who was again hanging about in places where he had no business to be.

Nikolai Nikolaievich had arrived from Petersburg that autumn. He had no apartment in Moscow and he did not wish to go to a hotel, so he had put up with some distant relatives of his, the Sventitskys. They had given him the corner room on the second floor.

The Sventitskys were childless, and the two-story house that their late parents had rented from time immemorial from the Princes Dolgoruky was too big for them. It was part of the untidy cluster of buildings in various styles with three courtyards and a garden that stood on the Dolgorukys ' property, bounded by three narrow side streets and known by the ancient name of Flour Town. In spite of its four windows, the study was darkish. It was cluttered up with books, papers, rugs, and prints. It had a balcony forming a semicircle around the corner of the house. The double glass door of the balcony was hermetically sealed for the winter.

The balcony door and two of the windows looked out on an alley that ran into the distance, with its sleigh tracks and the irregular line of its houses and fences.

Purple shadows reached into the room from the garden. The trees, laden with hoarfrost, their branches like smoky streaks of candle wax, looked in as if they wished to rest their burden on the floor of the study.

Nikolai Nikolaievich stood gazing into the distance. He thought of his last winter in Petersburg—Gapon, [2] Gorky, the visit to Prime Minister Witte, modern, fashionable writers. From that bedlam he had fled to the peace and quiet of the ancient capital to write the book he had in mind. But he had jumped out of the frying pan into the fire. Lectures every day—University Courses for Women, the Religious Philosophical Society, the Red Cross and the Strike Fund—not a moment to himself. What he needed was to get away to Switzerland, to some remote canton in the woods, to the peace of lakes, mountains, sky, and the echoing, ever-responsive air.

Nikolai Nikolaievich turned away from the window. He felt like going out to call on someone or just to walk about the streets, but he remembered that Vyvolochnov, the Tolstoyan, was coming to see him about some business or other. He paced up and down the room, his thoughts turning to his nephew.

When Nikolai Nikolaievich had moved from his retreat on the Volga to Petersburg he had left Yura in Moscow, where he had many relatives—the Vedeniapins, the Ostromyslenskys, the Seliavins, the Mikhaelises, the Sventitskys, and the Gromekos. At first Yura was foisted on the slovenly old chatterbox Ostromyslensky, known among the clan as Fedka. Fedka lived in sin with his ward Motia and therefore saw himself as a disrupter of the established order and a champion of progressive thought. He did not justify his kinsman ' s confidence, and even took the money given him for Yura ' s upkeep and spent it on himself. Yura was transferred to the professorial family of the Gromekos and was still with them.

The atmosphere at the Gromekos ' was eminently suitable, Nikolai Nikolaievich thought. They had their daughter, Tonia, who was Yura ' s age, and Misha Gordon, who was Yura ' s friend and classmate, living with them.

" And a comical triumvirate they make, " thought Nikolai Nikolaievich. The three of them had soaked themselves in The Meaning of Love and The Kreutzer Sonata and had a mania for preaching chastity. It was right, of course, for adolescents to go through a frenzy of purity, but they were overdoing it a bit, they had lost all sense of proportion.

How childish and eccentric they were! For some reason, they called the domain of the sensual, which disturbed them so much, " vulgar, " and used the expression in and out of place. A most ineptly chosen term! " Vulgar " was applied to instinct, to pornography, to exploitation of women, and almost to the whole physical world. They blushed or grew pale when they pronounced the word.

" If I had been in Moscow, " thought Nikolai Nikolaievich, " I would not have let it go so far. Modesty is necessary, but within limits…Ah! Nil Feoktistovich, come in! " he exclaimed, going out to meet his visitor.

10

A fat man in a gray Tolstoyan shirt with a broad leather belt, felt boots, and trousers bagging at the knees entered the room. He looked like a good soul with his head in the clouds. A pince-nez on a wide black ribbon quivered angrily on his nose. He had begun to take his things off in the hall but had not removed his scarf and came in with it trailing on the floor and his round felt hat still in his hand. These encumbrances prevented him from shaking hands with Nikolai Nikolaievich and even from saying How-do-you-do.

" Um-m-m, " he mooed helplessly, looking around the room.

" Put them down anywhere, " said Nikolai Nikolaievich, restoring Vyvolochnov ' s power of speech and self-possession.

Here was one of those followers of Tolstoy in whom the ideas of the genius who had never known peace had settled down to enjoy a long, unclouded rest, growing hopelessly shallow in the process. He had come to ask Nikolai Nikolaievich to speak at a meeting in aid of political deportees that was to be held at some school or other.

" I ' ve spoken at that school already. "

" In aid of our exiles? "

" Yes. "

" You ' ll have to do it again. "

Nikolai Nikolaievich balked a little and then gave in.

The business dealt with, Nikolai Nikolaievich did not attempt to delay his guest. Nil Feoktistovich could have left at once but he evidently felt that it would be unseemly and was looking for something lively and natural to say by way of parting. The conversation became strained and awkward.

" So you ' ve become a Decadent? Going in for mysticism? "

" What do you mean? "

" It ' s a waste, you know. Do you remember the county council? "

" Of course. Didn ' t we canvass for it together? "

" And we did some good work fighting for the village schools and teachers ' colleges. Remember? "

" Of course. It was a splendid battle. "

" And then you became interested in public health and social welfare, didn ' t you? "

" For a time, yes. "

" Hmm. And now it ' s all this highbrow stuff—fauns and nenuphars and ephebes and ' Let ' s be like the sun. ' I can ' t believe it, bless me if I can—an intelligent man like you, and with your sense of humor and your knowledge of the people.… Come, now.… Or am I intruding into the holy of holies? "

" Why all this talk? What are we arguing about? You don ' t know my ideas. "

" Russia needs schools and hospitals, not fauns and nenuphars. "

" No one denies it. "

" The peasants are in rags and famished.… "

So the conversation dragged on. Knowing how useless it was, Nikolai Nikolaievich tried nevertheless to explain what attracted him to some of the writers of the Symbolist school. Then, turning to Tolstoyan doctrines, he said:

" Up to a point I am with you, but Tolstoy says that the more a man devotes himself to beauty the further he moves away from goodness.… "

" And you think it ' s the other way round—the world will be saved by beauty, is that it? Dostoievsky, Rozanov, [3] mystery plays, and what not? "

" Wait, let me tell you what I think. I think that if the beast who sleeps in man could be held down by threats—any kind of threat, whether of jail or of retribution after death—then the highest emblem of humanity would be the lion tamer in the circus with his whip, not the prophet who sacrificed himself. But don ' t you see, this is just the point—what has for centuries raised man above the beast is not the cudgel but an inward music: the irresistible power of unarmed truth, the powerful attraction of its example. It has always been assumed that the most important things in the Gospels are the ethical maxims and commandments. But for me the most important thing is that Christ speaks in parables taken from life, that He explains the truth in terms of everyday reality. The idea that underlies this is that communion between mortals is immortal, and that the whole of life is symbolic because it is meaningful. "

" I haven ' t understood a word. You should write a book about it! "

After Vyvolochnov had left, Nikolai Nikolaievich felt extremely cross. He was angry with himself for having blurted out some of his most intimate thoughts to that fool, without impressing him in the least. Then his annoyance, as sometimes happens, changed its target. He recalled another incident.

He did not keep a diary, but once or twice a year he would record in a thick notebook some thought which struck him particularly. He got out the notebook now and began to write in a large, legible hand. This is what he wrote.

" Upset all day by that silly Shlesinger woman. She came in the morning, stayed till lunchtime, and for two solid hours bored me reading out that gibberish—a libretto in verse by the Symbolist A—to the cosmogonic symphony by the composer B—with the spirits of the planets, voices of the four elements, etc., etc. I listened with impatience, then I couldn ' t stand it and begged her to stop.

" And suddenly I understood everything. I understood why this stuff is so deadly, so insufferably false, even in Faust. The whole thing is artificial, no one is genuinely interested in it. Modern man has no need of it. When he is overcome by the mysteries of the universe he turns to physics, not to Hesiod ' s hexameters.

" And it isn ' t just that the form is an anachronism, or that these spirits of earth and air only confuse what science has unravelled. The fact is that this type of art is wholly out of keeping with the spirit, the essence, the motivating force of contemporary art.

" These cosmogonies were natural in the ancient world—a world settled so sparsely that nature was not yet eclipsed by man. Mammoths still walked the earth, dragons and dinosaurs were still fresh in people ' s memory. Nature hit you in the eye so plainly and grabbed you so fiercely and so tangibly by the scruff of the neck that perhaps it really was still full of gods. Those were the first pages of the chronicle of mankind, it was only just beginning.

" This ancient world ended with Rome, because of overpopulation.

" Rome was a flea market of borrowed gods and conquered peoples, a bargain basement on two floors, earth and heaven, a mass of filth convoluted in a triple knot as in an intestinal obstruction. Dacians, Herulians, Scythians, Sarmatians, Hyperboreans, heavy wheels without spokes, eyes sunk in fat, sodomy, double chins, illiterate emperors, fish fed on the flesh of learned slaves. There were more people in the world than there have ever been since, all crammed into the passages of the Coliseum, and all wretched.

" And then, into this tasteless heap of gold and marble, He came, light and clothed in an aura, emphatically human, deliberately provincial, Galilean, and at that moment gods and nations ceased to be and man came into being—man the carpenter, man the plowman, man the shepherd with his flock of sheep at sunset, man who does not sound in the least proud, man thankfully celebrated in all the cradle songs of mothers and in all the picture galleries the world over. "

11

The Petrovka looked like a corner of Petersburg in Moscow, with its matching houses on both sides of the street, the tastefully sculptured house entrances, the bookshop, the library, the cartographer ' s, the elegant tobacco shop, the excellent restaurant, its front door flanked by two gaslights in round frosted shades on massive brackets.

In winter the street frowned with a forbidding surliness. Its inhabitants were solid, self-respecting, prosperous members of the liberal professions.

Here Victor Ippolitovich Komarovsky rented his magnificent third-floor apartment, reached by a wide staircase with massive oak banisters. His housekeeper, or rather the chatelaine of his quiet retreat, Emma Ernestovna, took care of everything without meddling in his private life; she ran the place unseen and unheard. He repaid her with the knightly delicacy to be expected of so fine a gentleman, and never tolerated visitors, male or female, whose presence would have disturbed her peaceful, spinsterish world. A monastic stillness reigned in their home; the blinds were drawn, and everything was spotlessly clean, as in an operating room.

On Sunday mornings Victor Ippolitovich, accompanied by his bulldog, usually took a leisurely walk down the Petrovka and along Kuznetsky Most, and at one of the street corners they were joined by the actor and gambler Constantine Illarionovich Satanidi.

They walked together along Kuznetsky Most, telling each other dirty stories, snorting with contempt, and laughing shamelessly in deep, loud voices that filled the air with sounds no more significant than the howling of a dog.

12

The weather was on the mend. Plop-plop-plop went the water drops on the metal of the drainpipes and the cornices, roof tapping messages to roof as if it were spring. It was thawing.

Lara walked all the way in a daze and realized what had happened to her only when she reached home.

Everyone was asleep. She fell back into her trance and in this abstracted state sat down at her mother ' s dressing table, still in her pale mauve, almost white, lace-trimmed dress and long veil borrowed for the evening from the workshop, like a costume. She sat before her reflection in the mirror, and saw nothing. Then, folding her arms, she put them on the dressing table and buried her head in them.

If Mother learned about it she would kill her. She would kill her and then she would kill herself.

How had it happened? How could it possibly have happened? It was too late now, she should have thought of it earlier.

Now she was—what was it called?—a fallen woman. She was a woman out of a French novel, and tomorrow she would go to school and sit side by side with those other girls who were like little children compared with her. O God, O God, how did it happen?

Some day, many, many years later, when it would be possible, Lara would tell Olia Demina, and Olia would hug her and burst into tears.

Outside the window the water drops plopped on and on, the thaw muttered its spells. Down the road someone was banging on a neighbor ' s door. Lara did not raise her head. Her shoulders quivered. She was weeping.

13

" Ah, Emma Ernestovna, that ' s unimportant. I ' m sick and tired of it. " He kept opening and shutting drawers, turning things out, throwing cuffs and collars all over the rug and the sofa, without knowing what he was looking for.

He needed her desperately, and there was no way of seeing her that Sunday. He paced up and down the room frantically like a caged animal.

Nothing equalled her spiritual beauty. Her hands were stunning like a sublime idea. Her shadow on the wall of the hotel room was like the outline of her innocence. Her slip was stretched over her breast, as firmly and simply as linen on an embroidery frame.

His fingers drummed on the windowpane in time to the unhurried thud of horses ' hoofs on the asphalt pavement below. " Lara, " he whispered, shutting his eyes, and he had a vision of her head resting on his hands; her eyes were closed, she was asleep, unconscious that he watched her sleeplessly for hours on end. Her hair was scattered and its beauty stung his eyes like smoke and ate into his heart.

His Sunday walk was not being a success. He strolled a few paces with Jack, stopped, thought of Kuznetsky Most, of Satanidi ' s jokes, of the acquaintances he met on the street—no, it was more than he could bear. He turned back. The dog, startled, looked up disapprovingly and waddled after him reluctantly.

" What can it all mean? " thought Komarovsky. " What has come over me? " Could it be his conscience, a feeling of pity, or repentance? Or was he worried about her? No, he knew she was safe at home? Then why couldn ' t he get her out of his head?

He walked back to his house, up the stairs, and past the first landing. The stained-glass ornamental coats of arms at the corners of the window threw colored patches of light at his feet. Halfway up the second flight he stopped.

He must not give in to this exhausting, nagging, anxious mood. He was not a schoolboy, after all. He must realize what would happen if instead of being just a toy this girl—a mere child, the daughter of his dead friend—turned into an obsession. He must come to his senses. He must be true to himself and to his habits. Otherwise everything would go up in smoke.

Komarovsky gripped the oak railing until it hurt his hand, shut his eyes a moment, then turned back resolutely and went down. On the landing, with its patches of light, the dog was waiting for him. It lifted its head like a slobbering old dwarf with hanging jowls and looked up at him adoringly.

The dog hated the girl, tore her stockings, growled at her, bared its teeth. It was jealous of her as if fearing that she would infect its master with something human.

" Ah, I see! You have decided that everything is going to be just as before—Satanidi, mean tricks, dirty jokes? All right then, take this, and this, and this. " He struck the bulldog with his stick and kicked it. Jack squealed, howled, waddled up the stairs shaking his behind, and scratched at the door to complain to Emma Ernestovna. Days and weeks went by.

14

What an inescapable spell it was! If Komarovsky ' s intrusion into Lara ' s life had merely filled her with disgust, she would have rebelled and broken free. But it was not so simple as that.

The girl was flattered that a handsome man whose hair was turning gray, a man old enough to be her father, a man who was applauded at meetings and written up in the newspapers, should spend his time and money on her, should take her out to concerts and plays, and tell her that he worshipped her, and should, as they say, " improve her mind. "

After all, she was still a girl in a brown uniform who enjoyed harmless plots and pranks at school. Komarovsky ' s lovemaking in a carriage behind the coachman ' s back or in an opera box in full view of the audience fascinated her by its daring and aroused the little devil slumbering in her to imitate him.

But this mischievous, girlish infatuation was short-lived. A nagging depression and horror at herself were taking permanent hold of her. And all the time she wanted to sleep—because (she told herself) she did not get enough sleep at night, because she cried so much, because she had constant headaches, because she worked hard at school, and because she was physically exhausted.

15

He was the curse of her life; she hated him. Every day she returned to these thoughts.

She has become his slave for life. How has he subjugated her? How does he force her to submit, why does she surrender, why does she gratify his wishes and delight him with her quivering unconcealed shame? Because of his age, her mother ' s financial dependence on him, his cleverness in frightening her, Lara? No, no, no! That is all nonsense.

It is she who has a hold on him. Doesn ' t she see how much he needs her? She has nothing to be afraid of, her conscience is clear. It is he who should be ashamed, and terrified of her giving him away. But that is just what she will never do. To do this she does not have the necessary ruthlessness—Komarovsky ' s chief asset in dealing with subordinates and weaklings.

This is precisely the difference between them. And it is this that makes the whole of life so terrifying. Does it crush you by thunder and lightning? No, by oblique glances and whispered calumny. It is all treachery and ambiguity. Any single thread is as fragile as a cobweb, but just try to pull yourself out of the net, you only become more entangled.

And the strong are dominated by the weak and the ignoble.

16

What if she were married, she asked herself, what difference would it make? She entered the path of sophistry. But at times she was overtaken by a hopeless anguish.

How can he not be ashamed to grovel at her feet and plead with her? " We can ' t go on like this. Think what I have done to you! You will end up in the gutter. We must tell your mother. I ' ll marry you. " He wept and insisted as though she were arguing and refusing. But all this was just words, and Lara did not even listen to these tragic, hollow protestations.

And he continued taking her, veiled, to dinner in the private rooms of that ghastly restaurant where the waiters and the clients undressed her with their eyes as she came in. And she merely wondered: " Does one always humiliate those one loves? "

Once she had a dream. She was buried, and there was nothing left of her except her left shoulder and her right foot. A tuft of grass sprouted from her left breast and above the ground people were singing " Black eyes and white breast " and " Masha must not go to the river. "

17

Lara was not religious. She did not believe in ritual. But sometimes, to be able to bear life, she needed the accompaniment of an inner music. She could not always compose such a music for herself. That music was God ' s word of life, and it was to weep over it that she went to church.

Once, early in December, she went to pray with such a heavy heart that she felt as if at any moment the earth might open at her feet and the vaulted ceiling of the church cave in. It would serve her right, it would put an end to the whole thing. She only regretted that she had taken that chatterbox, Olia Demina, with her.

" There ' s Prov Afanasievich, " whispered Olia.

" Sh-sh. Leave me alone. What Prov Afanasievich? "

" Prov Afanasievich Sokolov. The one who ' s chanting. He ' s our cousin twice removed. "

" Oh, the psalmist. Tiverzin ' s relative. Sh-sh. Stop talking. Don ' t disturb me, please. "

They had come in at the beginning of the service. They were singing the psalm " Bless the Lord, O my soul: and all that is within me, bless His holy name. "

The church was half empty, and every sound in it echoed hollowly. Only in front was there a crowd of worshippers standing close together. The building was new. The plain glass of the window added no color to the gray, snowbound, busy street outside and the people who walked or drove through it. Near that window stood a church warden paying no attention to the service and loudly reproving a deaf, half-witted beggarwoman in a voice as flat and commonplace as the window and the street.

In the time it took Lara, clutching her pennies in her fist, to make her way to the door past the worshippers without disturbing them, buy two candles for herself and Olia, and turn back, Prov Afanasievich had rattled off nine of the beatitudes at a pace suggesting that they were well enough known without him.

Blessed are the poor in spirit.… Blessed are they that mourn.… Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness.…

Lara started and stood still. This was about her. He was saying: Happy are the downtrodden. They have something to tell about themselves. They have everything before them. That was what He thought. That was Christ ' s judgment.

18

It was the time of the Presnia uprising. The Guishars ' flat was in the rebel area. A barricade was being built in Tver Street a few yards from their house. People carried buckets of water from their yards in order to cement the stones and scrap iron with ice.

The neighboring yard was used by the workers ' militia as an assembly point, something between a Red Cross post and a soup kitchen.

Lara knew two of the boys who went to it. One was Nika Dudorov, a friend of her school friend Nadia. He was proud, straightforward, taciturn. He was like Lara and did not interest her.

The other was Pasha Antipov, the gymnasium student, who lived with old Tiverzina, Olia Demina ' s grandmother. Lara noticed the effect she had on the boy when she met him at the Tiverzins ' . He was so childishly simple that he did not conceal his joy at seeing her, as if she were some summer landscape of birch trees, grass, and clouds, and could freely express his enthusiasm about her without any risk of being laughed at.

As soon as she realized the kind of influence she had on him, she began unconsciously to make use of it. However, it was not until several years later and at a much further stage in their relationship that she took his malleable, easygoing character seriously in hand. By then Pasha knew that he was head over heels in love with her and that it was for life.

The two boys were playing the most terrible and adult of games, war; moreover, participation in this particular war was punishable by deportation and hanging. Yet the way their woollen caps were tied at the back suggested that they were children, that they still had fathers and mothers who looked after them. Lara thought of them as a grownup thinks of children. Their dangerous amusements had a bloom of innocence that they communicated to everything—to the evening, so shaggy with hoarfrost that it seemed more black than white, to the dark blue shadows in the yard, to the house across the road where the boys were hiding, and, above all, to the continual revolver shots which came from it. " The boys are shooting, " thought Lara. This was how she thought not only of Nika and Pasha but of the whole fighting city. " Good, decent boys, " she thought. " It ' s because they are good that they are shooting. "

19

They learned that the barricade might be shelled and that their house would be in danger. It was too late to think of going to stay with friends in some other part of Moscow, the quarter was surrounded; they had to find shelter in the neighborhood, within the ring. They thought of the Montenegro.

It turned out that they were not the first to think of it. The hotel was full. There were many others who shared their predicament. For old time ' s sake the proprietor promised to put them up in the linen room.

Not to attract attention by carrying suitcases, they packed the most necessary things into three bundles; then they put off moving from day to day.

Because the employees of the workshop were treated rather like family members, they had continued to work despite the strike. But one dull, cold afternoon there was a ring at the door. Someone had come to complain and to argue. The owner was asked for. Fetisova went instead to pour oil on the troubled waters. A few moments later she called the seamstresses into the hall and introduced them to the visitor. He shook hands all round, clumsily and with emotion, and went away having apparently reached an agreement with Fetisova.

The seamstresses came back into the workroom and began tying on their shawls and putting on their shabby winter coats.

" What has happened? " asked Madame Guishar, hurrying in.

" They ' re calling us out, Madam, we ' re on strike. "

" But…Have I ever wronged you? " Madame Guishar burst into tears.

" Don ' t be upset, Amalia Karlovna. We ' ve got nothing against you. We ' re very grateful to you. It ' s not just you and us. Everybody ' s doing the same, the whole world. You can ' t go against everybody, can you? "

They all went away, even Olia Demina and Fetisova, who whispered to Madame Guishar in parting that she agreed to the strike for the good of the owner and the establishment. But Amalia Karlovna was inconsolable.

" What black ingratitude! To think that I was so mistaken in these people! The kindness I ' ve lavished on that brat! Well, admittedly she ' s only a child, but that old witch! "

" They can ' t make an exception just for you, Mother, don ' t you see? " Lara said soothingly. " No one bears you any malice. On the contrary. All that ' s being done now is done in the name of humanity, in defense of the weak, for the good of women and children. Yes, it is. Don ' t shake your head so skeptically. You ' ll see, one day you and I will be better off because of it. "

But her mother could not understand. " It ' s always like this, " she sobbed. " Just when I can ' t think straight you come out with something that simply astounds me. People play a dirty trick on me, and you say it ' s all for my good. No, really, I must be out of my mind. "

Rodia was at school. Lara and her mother wandered about aimlessly, alone in the empty house. The unlit street stared emptily into the rooms, and the rooms returned its stare.

" Let ' s go to the hotel, Mother, before it gets dark, " Lara begged. " Do come, Mother. Don ' t put it off, let ' s go now. "

" Filat, Filat, " they called the janitor. " Take us to the Montenegro, be a good boy. "

" Very good, Madam. "

" Take the bundles over. And keep an eye on the house, Filat, until things sort themselves out. And please don ' t forget the bird seed for Kirill Modestovich, and to change his water. And keep everything locked up. That ' s all, I think, and please keep in touch with us. "

" Very well, Madam. "

" Thank you, Filat. God keep you. Well, let ' s sit down [4] and then we must be off. "

When they went out the fresh air seemed as unfamiliar as after weeks of illness. Noises, rounded, as if turned on a lathe, rolled echoing lightly through the crisp, frosty, nut-clean space. Shots and salvoes smacked, thudded, and plopped, flattening the distances into a pancake.

However much Filat tried to convince them to the contrary, Lara and Amalia Karlovna insisted that the shots were blanks.

" Don ' t be silly, Filat. Think it out for yourself. How could they be anything but blanks when you can ' t see anyone shooting? Who d ' you think is shooting, the Holy Ghost or what? Of course they ' re blanks. "

At one of the crossroads they were stopped by a patrol of grinning Cossacks who searched them, insolently running their hands over them from head to foot. Their visorless caps with chin straps were tilted jauntily over one ear; it made all of them look one-eyed.

" Wonderful, " thought Lara as she walked on. She would not see Komarovsky for as long as the district was cut off from the rest of the town. Because of her mother it was impossible for her to break with him. She could not say: " Mother, please stop seeing him. " If she did that, it would all come out. And what if it did? Why should that frighten her? Oh, God! Anything, anything, if only it would end! God! God! She would fall down in a faint with disgust. What was it she had just remembered? What was the name of that frightful picture? There was a fat Roman in it. It hung in the first of those private rooms, the one where it all began. " The Woman or the Vase " —yes, that was it. Of course. It was a famous picture. The woman or the vase. When she first saw it she was not yet a woman, she was not yet comparable to an expensive work of art. That came later. The table was splendidly set for a feast.

" Where do you think you are running like that? I can ' t keep up with you, " panted Madame Guishar. Lara walked swiftly, some unknown force swept her on as though she were striding on air, carried along by this proud, quickening strength.

" How splendid, " she thought, listening to the gun shots. " Blessed are the downtrodden. Blessed are the deceived. God speed you, bullets. You and I are of one mind. "

20

The brothers Gromeko had a house at the corner of Sivtsev Vrazhok and another small street. Alexander Alexandrovich and Nikolai Alexandrovich Gromeko were professors of chemistry, the one at the Peter ' s Academy, the other at the University. Nikolai was unmarried. Alexander had a wife, Anna Ivanovna, N é e Krueger. Her father was an ironmaster; he owned an enormous estate in the Urals, near Yuriatin, on which there were several abandoned, unprofitable mines.

The Gromekos ' house had two stories. On the top floor were the bedrooms, the schoolroom, Alexander Alexandrovich ' s study and his library, Anna Ivanovna ' s boudoir, and Tonia ' s and Yura ' s rooms. The ground floor was used for receptions. Its pistachio-colored curtains, gleaming piano top, aquarium, olive-green upholstery, and potted plants resembling seaweed made it look like a green, sleepily swaying sea bed.

The Gromekos were cultivated, hospitable, and great connoisseurs and lovers of music. They often held receptions and evenings of chamber music at which piano trios, violin sonatas, and string quartets were performed.

Such a musical evening was to be held in January, 1906. There was to be a first performance of a violin sonata by a young composer, a pupil of Taneiev ' s, and a trio by Tchaikovsky.

The preparations were begun the day before. The furniture was moved around in the ballroom. In one corner the piano tuner struck the same chord dozens of times and scattered arpeggios like handfuls of beads. In the kitchen, chickens were being plucked, vegetables cleaned, and mustard mixed with olive oil for sauces and salad dressings.

Shura Shlesinger, Anna ' s bosom friend and confidante, had come first thing in the morning, making a nuisance of herself.

She was a tall thin woman with regular features and a rather masculine face which recalled the Emperor ' s, especially when she wore her gray astrakhan hat set at an angle; she kept it on in the house, only slightly raising the veil pinned to it.

In times of sorrow or anxiety the two friends lightened each other ' s burdens. They did this by saying unpleasant things to each other, their conversation becoming increasingly caustic until an emotional storm burst and soon ended in tears and a reconciliation. These periodic quarrels had a tranquillizing effect on both, like the application of leeches for high blood pressure.

Shura Shlesinger had been married several times, but she forgot her husbands as soon as she divorced them, and despite her many marriages there was a certain coldness, like that of a spinster, about her.

She was a theosophist, but she was also an expert on the ritual of the Orthodox Church, and even when she was toute transport é e , in a state of utter ecstasy, could not refrain from prompting the officiating clergy. " Hear, O Lord, " " Now and ever shall be, " " glorious cherubim " she muttered ceaselessly in her hoarse, staccato patter.

Shura Shlesinger knew mathematics, esoteric Indian doctrine, the addresses of the best-known teachers at the Moscow Conservatory, who was living with whom, and God only knows what else. For this reason she was called in, as arbiter and organizer, on all important occasions in life.

At the appointed time the guests began to arrive. There came Adelaida Filippovna, Gints, the Fufkovs, Mr. and Mrs. Basurman, the Verzhitskis, Colonel Kavkaztsev. It was snowing, and whenever the front door was opened you could see the swirling air rush past, as though tangled in a thousand knots by the flickering snow. The men came in out of the cold in high clumsy snow boots, and every one of them, without exception, did his best to look like a country bumpkin; but their wives, on the contrary, their faces glowing from the frost, coats unbuttoned, shawls pushed back and hair spangled with rime, looked like hardened coquettes, cunning itself. " Cui ' s nephew, " the whisper went round as the new pianist came in.

Beyond the open side doors of the ballroom the supper table gleamed, white and long as a winter road. The play of light on frosted bottles of red rowanberry cordial caught the eye. The crystal cruets on silver stands and the picturesque arrangement of game and zakuski [5] captured the imagination. The napkins folded into stiff pyramids and the baskets of mauve cineraria smelling of almonds seemed to whet the appetite.

Not to delay the pleasure of earthly food too long, the company got down hastily to their spiritual repast. They sat down in rows. " Cui ' s nephew, " they whispered again as the musician took his place at the piano. The concert began.

The sonata was known to be dry, labored, and boring. The performance confirmed this belief, and the work turned out to be terribly long as well.

During the interval the critic Kerimbekov and Alexander Gromeko had an argument about it, Kerimbekov running it down and Gromeko defending it. All around them people smoked, talked, and moved their chairs, till the glittering tablecloth in the adjoining room once again attracted attention. All proposed that the concert be resumed without delay.

The pianist cast a sideways glance at the audience, and signalled his partners to begin. The violinist and Tyshkevich flourished their bows. The music rose plaintively.

Yura, Tonia, and Misha Gordon, who spent half his time at the Gromekos ' , were sitting in the third row.

" Egorovna is making signs at you, " Yura whispered to Alexander Alexandrovich, who sat directly in front of him.

Egorovna, the Gromekos ' white-haired old servant, stood in the doorway and by staring desperately at Yura and nodding with equal energy at Alexander Alexandrovich tried to make Yura understand that she needed urgently to speak to the master.

Alexander Alexandrovich turned, gave her a reproachful look, and shrugged his shoulders, but she stood her ground. Soon they were talking across the room by signs, like a couple of deaf-mutes. People were looking. Anna Ivanovna cast devastating glances at her husband. He got up. Something had to be done. Blushing, he tiptoed around the edge of the room.

" How can you do such a thing, Egorovna! Really now, what ' s all the fuss? Well, hurry up, what is it? "

Egorovna whispered in his ear.

" What Montenegro? "

" The hotel. "

" Well, what about it? "

" They ' re asking for him to go back at once. There ' s a relative of his dying. "

" So now they ' re dying! I can imagine.… It can ' t be done, Egorovna. When they ' ve finished this piece I ' ll tell them. Until then I can ' t. "

" They ' ve sent the hotel waiter with a cab. They ' re waiting. Somebody ' s dying, I tell you, can ' t you understand? It ' s a lady. "

" And I tell you it ' s impossible. As if a few minutes could make all that difference. " He tiptoed back to his place with a worried frown, rubbing the bridge of his nose.

At the end of the first movement, before the applause had died down, he went up to the musicians and told Tyshkevich that he was needed at home, there had been some accident, they would have to stop playing. Then he turned to the audience and held up his hands for silence:

" Ladies and gentlemen, I am afraid the trio has to be interrupted. The cellist has just received some bad news. All our sympathy is with him. He has to leave us. I wouldn ' t like him to go by himself at such a moment. He may need help. I ' ll go with him. Be a good boy, Yurochka, go and tell Semion to bring the carriage around, he ' s had it ready for some time. Ladies and gentlemen, I won ' t say goodbye—I beg you all to stay—I won ' t be long. "

The boys asked to go with him for the sake of the drive through the frosty night.

21

Although the normal flow of life had been restored since December, shooting could still be heard, and the houses burned down as the result of ordinary fires looked like the smoldering ruins of those destroyed during the uprising.

The boys had never been for such a long drive before. In reality the Montenegro was a stone ' s throw away—down the Smolensky Boulevard, along the Novinsky, and halfway up Sadovaia Street—but the savage frost and fog separated space into disconnected fragments, as if space were not homogeneous the world over. The shaggy, ragged smoke of bonfires, [6] the crunch of footsteps and the whine of sleigh runners, contributed to give the impression that they had been travelling for God knows how long and had arrived at some terrifyingly remote place.

Outside the hotel entrance stood a narrow, elegant-looking sleigh; the horse was covered with a cloth and had bandaged fetlocks. The driver sat hunched up in the passengers ' seat, trying to keep warm, his swathed head buried in his huge gloved paws.

It was warm in the hotel lobby. Behind the cloakroom counter the porter dozed, lulled by the hum of the ventilator, the roar of the blazing stove, and the whistle of the boiling samovar, to be wakened occasionally by one of his own snores.

A thickly made-up woman with a face like a dumpling stood by the looking glass on the left. Her fur jacket was too light for the weather. She was waiting for someone to come down; her back to the glass, she turned her head over each shoulder to make sure that she looked attractive behind.

The frozen cab driver came in. His bulging coat made him look like a twisted bun on a baker ' s sign, and the clouds of steam he gave off increased the likeness. " How much longer will you be, Mam ' zel? " he asked the woman by the looking glass. " Why I ever get mixed up with your sort, I don ' t know. I don ' t want my horse to freeze to death. "

The incident in No. 23 was only one more nuisance added to the daily vexations of the hotel staff. Every minute the bells shrilled and numbers popped up inside the long glass box on the wall showing which guest in which room was going frantic and pestering the servants without knowing what he wanted.

At the moment the doctor was giving an emetic to that old fool Guisharova and washing out her guts. Glasha, the maid, was run off her feet mopping up the floor and carrying dirty buckets out and clean ones in. But the storm now raging in the service room had started well before this hullabaloo, before Tirashka had been sent in a cab to fetch the doctor and that wretched fiddler, before Komarovsky had arrived and so many people had cluttered up the corridor outside the door.

The trouble had started that afternoon, when someone had turned clumsily in the narrow passage leading from the pantry to the landing and had accidentally pushed the waiter Sysoi just as he was rushing out, bending slightly with a fully loaded tray balanced on his right hand. The tray clattered to the floor, the soup was spilled, and two soup plates and one meat plate were smashed.

Sysoi insisted that it had been the dishwasher, she was answerable and she should pay for the damage. By now it was nearly eleven o ' clock and half the staff were due to go off duty shortly, but the row was still going on.

" He ' s got the shakes, can ' t keep his hands and feet steady. All he cares about is sitting with a bottle, you ' d think it was his wife, getting pickled like a herring, and then he asks who pushed him, who spilled his soup, who smashed his crockery. Now who do you think pushed you, you devil, you Astrakhan pest, you shameless creature? "

" I have told you already, Matriona Stepanovna, watch your language. "

" And who ' s the one that all the fuss is about now, I ask you? You ' d think it was somebody worth smashing crockery for. But it ' s that slut, that streetwalker giving herself airs, that damned madam, innocence in retirement, done so well for herself she ' s swigging arsenic. Of course, living at the Montenegro, she wouldn ' t know an alley cat if she met one. "

Misha and Yura walked up and down the corridor outside Madame Guishar ' s room. It had all turned out quite differently from anything Alexander Alexandrovich had expected. He had imagined a clean and dignified tragedy in a musician ' s life. But this was sordid and scandalous, and certainly not for children.

The boys were waiting in the corridor.

" Go in to the lady now, young gentlemen. " The valet came up to them and for the second time tried to persuade them in his soft unhurried voice. " You go in, don ' t worry. The lady ' s all right, you needn ' t be afraid. She ' s quite recovered. You can ' t stand here. There was an accident here this afternoon, valuable china was smashed. You can see we have to run up and down serving meals, and it ' s a bit narrow. You go in there. "

The boys complied.

Inside the room, a lighted kerosene lamp which ordinarily hung over the table had been taken out of its bracket and carried behind the wooden screen, where it stank of bedbugs. This was a sleeping alcove separated from the rest of the room and strangers ' eyes by a dusty curtain, but the curtain had been flung over the screen and in the confusion no one had thought of drawing it. The lamp stood on a bench and lit the alcove harshly from below as though by a footlight.

Madame Guishar had tried to poison herself not with arsenic, as the dishwasher thought, but with iodine. The room had the tart, astringent smell of green walnuts when their husks are still soft and blacken at a touch.

Behind the screen the maid was mopping up the floor, and lying on the bed was a half-naked woman; drenched with water, tears, and sweat, her hair stuck together, she was holding her head over a bucket and crying loudly.

The boys turned away at once, so embarrassing and unmannerly did they feel it was to look in her direction. But Yura had seen enough to be struck by the fact that in certain clumsy, tense positions, in moments of strain and exertion, a woman ceases to be such as she is represented in sculpture and looks more like a wrestler with bulging muscles, stripped down to his shorts and ready for the match.

At last someone behind the screen had the sense to draw the curtain.

" Fadei Kazimirovich, my dear, where ' s your hand? Give me your hand, " the woman was saying, choking with tears and nausea. " Oh, I have been through such horrors. I had such terrible suspicions.… Fadei Kazimirovich…I imagined…but happily it has all turned out to be nonsense, just my disordered imagination.… Just think what a relief, and the upshot of it all…here I am…here I am alive.… "

" Calm yourself, Amalia Karlovna, I beg you…How awkward all this is, I must say, how very awkward. "

" We ' ll be off home now, " said Alexander Alexandrovich gruffly to the children. Excruciatingly embarrassed, they stood in the doorway, and as they did not know where to look they stared straight in front of them into the shadowy depth of the main room, from which the lamp had been removed. The walls were hung with photographs, there was a bookshelf filled with music scores, a desk piled with papers and albums, and beyond the dining table with a crocheted cover a girl was asleep in an armchair, clasping its back and pressing her cheek against it. She must have been dead tired to be able to sleep in spite of all the noise and excitement.

" We ' ll be off now, " Alexander Alexandrovich said again. There had been no sense in their coming, and to stay any longer would be indecent. " As soon as Fadei Kazimirovich comes out…I must say goodbye to him. "

It was not Tyshkevich who came out from behind the screen, but a thickset, portly, self-confident man. Carrying the lamp above his head, he went over to the table and replaced it in its bracket. The light woke up the girl. She smiled at him, squinting her eyes and stretching.

At sight of the stranger, Misha gave a start and stared at him intently. He pulled Yura ' s sleeve and tried to whisper to him, but Yura would not have it. " You can ' t whisper in front of people. What will they think of you? "

Meanwhile a silent scene took place between the girl and the man. Not a word passed their lips, only their eyes met. But the understanding between them had a terrifying quality of magic, as if he were the master of a puppet show and she were a puppet obedient to his every gesture.

A tired smile puckered her eyes and loosened her lips, but in answer to his sneering glance she gave him a sly wink of complicity. Both of them were pleased that it had all ended so well—their secret was safe and Madame Guishar ' s attempted suicide had failed.

Yura devoured them with his eyes. Unseen in the half darkness, he kept staring into the circle of lamplight. The scene between the captive girl and her master was both ineffably mysterious and shamelessly frank. His heart was torn by contradictory feelings of a strength he had never experienced before.

Here was the very thing which he, Tonia, and Misha had endlessly discussed as " vulgar, " the force which so frightened and attracted them and which they controlled so easily from a safe distance by words. And now here it was, this force, in front of Yura ' s very eyes, utterly real, and yet troubled and haunting, pitilessly destructive, and complaining and calling for help—and what had become of their childish philosophy and what was Yura to do now?

" Do you know who that man was? " said Misha when they went out into the street. Yura, absorbed in his thoughts, did not reply.

" He ' s the one who encouraged your father to drink and drove him to his death. In the train—you remember—I told you. "

Yura was thinking about the girl and the future, not about his father and the past. At first he could not even understand what Misha was saying. It was too cold to talk.

" You must be frozen, Semion, " Alexander Alexandrovich said to the coachman. They drove home.

THREE

The Sventitskys ' Christmas Party