4

According to the Red Cross International Convention, the army medical personnel must not take part in the military operations of the belligerents. But on one occasion the doctor was forced to break this rule. He was in the field when an engagement began and he had to share the fate of the combatants and shoot in self-defense.

The front line, where he was caught by enemy fire, was at the edge of a forest. He threw himself down on the ground next to the unit's telephonist. The forest was at their back, in front of them was a field, and across this open, undefended space the Whites were attacking.

The Whites were now close enough for the doctor to see their faces. They were boys, recent volunteers from the civilian population of the capitals, and older men mobilized from the reserve. The tone was set by the youngsters, first-year students from the universities and last-year students from gymnasiums.

None of them were known to the doctor, yet half the faces looked familiar. Some of them reminded him of former classmates and he wondered if they were their younger brothers; others he felt he had noticed in a theater crowd or in the street in years gone by. Their expressive, handsome faces seemed to belong to people of his own kind.

Responding to duty as they understood it, they displayed enthusiasm and a reckless courage that was entirely out of place. Advancing in extended formation and excelling the parade ground smartness of the Imperial Guards, they walked defiantly upright, neither running nor throwing themselves to the ground, ignoring the irregularities of the terrain, behind which they might easily have taken cover. The bullets of the partisans mowed them down.

In the middle of the wide, bare field there was a dead tree, blasted by lightning or charred by fire, or scorched and splintered in the course of some earlier battles. Each of the advancing volunteers glanced at it, fighting the temptation to stop behind it for shelter and a surer aim, then, casting the thought aside, walked on.

The partisans had a limited supply of cartridges and were under orders to fire only at short range and at clearly visible targets.

Yurii Andreievich had no rifle; he lay on the grass watching the course of the engagement. All his sympathies were on the side of these heroically dying children. With all his heart he wished them success. They belonged to families who were probably akin to him in spirit, in education, in moral discipline and values.

It occurred to him to run out into the field and give himself up, thus obtaining his release. But that was dangerous, too dangerous. While he was running with his arms raised above his head he could be shot down from both sides, struck in the breast and in the back—by the partisans in punishment for his betrayal and by the Whites in misunderstanding of his motives. He knew this kind of situation, he had been in it before, he had considered all the possibilities of such escape plans and had rejected them as unfeasible. So resigning himself to his divided feelings, he lay on his belly on the grass, his face toward the clearing, and watched, unarmed, the course of the battle.

But to look on inactively while the mortal struggle raged all around was impossible, it was beyond human strength. It was not a question of loyalty to the side that held him captive or of defending his own life, but of submitting to the order of events, to the laws governing what went on around him. To remain an outsider was against the rules. You had to do what everyone was doing. A battle was going on. He and his comrades were being shot at. He had to shoot back.

So when the telephonist at his side jerked convulsively and then lay still, he crept over to him, took his cartridge bag and rifle, and, going back to his place, emptied the gun, shot after shot.

But as pity prevented him from aiming at the young men whom he admired and with whom he sympathized, and simply to shoot into the air would be too silly, he fired at the blasted tree, choosing those moments when there was no one between his sights and his target. He followed his own technique.

Setting the sights and gradually improving his aim as he pressed the trigger slowly and not all the way down, as if not in fact intending to release the bullet, so that in the end the shot went off of itself and as it were unexpectedly, he fired with the precision of old habit at the dead wood of the lower branches, lopping them off and scattering them around the tree.

But alas!—however carefully he tried to avoid hitting anyone, every now and then a young attacker would move into his firing line at the crucial moment. Two of them he wounded, and one who fell near the tree seemed to have lost his life.

At last the White command, convinced of the futility of the attack, ordered a retreat.

The partisans were few. Part of their main force was on a march and others had engaged a larger enemy detachment some way off. Not to disclose their weakness, they refrained from pursuing the retreating Whites.

Angelar joined the doctor in the clearing with two medics carrying stretchers. Telling him to attend to the wounded, the doctor bent over the telephonist in the vague hope that he might still be breathing and could be revived. But when he undid his shirt and felt his heart, he found that it had stopped.

An amulet hung by a silk cord from the dead man's neck. The doctor took it off. It contained a sheet of paper, worn and rotted at the folds, sewn into a piece of cloth.

Written on the paper, which almost fell apart in the doctor's fingers when he unfolded it, were excerpts from the Ninety-first Psalm with such changes in the wording as often creep into popular prayers through much repetition, making them deviate increasingly from the original. The Church Slavonic text was transliterated into Russian script.

The words of the psalm, "He that dwelleth in the secret place of the Most High," had become the title, "Dwell High." The verse "Thou shall not be afraid for the terror by night nor for the arrow that flieth by day" was changed into the exhortation: "Do not be afraid of the arrows of flying war." When the psalm says: "He hath known my name," the paper said: "He postpones my name," and "I will be with him in trouble: I will deliver him" was garbled into "I will relieve him from darkness."

The text was believed to be miraculous and a protection against bullets. It had been worn as a talisman by soldiers in the last imperialist war. Decades later prisoners were to sew it into their clothes and mutter its words in jail when they were summoned at night for interrogation.

Leaving the telephonist, Yurii Andreievich went out into the field to the young White Guardsman whom he had killed. The boy's handsome face bore the marks of innocence and of all-forgiving suffering. "Why did I kill him?" thought the doctor.

He undid the boy's coat and opened it. Some careful hand—probably his mother's—had embroidered his name and surname, Seriozha Rantsevich, in carefully traced cursive letters on the lining. From the opening of Seriozha's shirt there slipped out and hung suspended by a chain a cross, a locket, and some other small flat gold case, rather like a snuffbox, dented as if a nail had been driven into it. A paper fell out. The doctor unfolded it and could not believe his eyes. It was the same Ninety-first Psalm but this time printed in its full and original Slavonic text.

At this moment Seriozha groaned and stirred. He was alive. It appeared afterward that he had only been stunned as the result of a slight internal injury. The bullet had been stopped by his mother's amulet and this had saved him. But what was to be done with this unconscious man now?

It was a time when savagery was at its height. Prisoners did not reach headquarters alive and enemy wounded were knifed in the field.

In the existing state of the partisan force, with its high turnover of deserters to and from the enemy, it was possible, if the strictest secrecy were kept, to pass Rantsevich off as a recently enlisted ally.

Yurii Andreievich took off the outer clothing of the dead telephonist and, with the help of Angelar, in whom he confided, exchanged it for that of the boy.

He and Angelar nursed Seriozha back to health. When he was well they released him, although he did not conceal from them that he meant to go back to Kolchak's army and continue fighting the Reds.

5

In the autumn the partisans took up quarters in Fox's Thicket, a small wood on a steep hill with a swift stream foaming around three sides of it and biting into the shores.

The Whites had wintered in it the year before and had dug themselves in with the help of the neighboring villagers, but they had left in the spring without destroying their fortifications. Now their dugouts and communication trenches were used by the partisans.

The doctor shared a dugout with Liberius Mikulitsyn, who had kept him awake by chattering for two nights running.

"I wonder what my esteemed parent, my respected Papa, is doing at this moment."

"God, how I hate this buffoonery," the doctor thought, with a sigh. "And yet he's the living image of his father."

"Judging from our previous talks, you got to know him quite well. You seem to have formed a not unfavorable opinion of him. What can you say on the subject, my dear sir?"

"Liberius Averkievich, tomorrow we have the pre-election meeting. And there is the trial of the medics who have been brewing vodka coming up—Lajos and I have still got to go through the evidence. I have to see him tomorrow for that purpose. And I haven't slept for two nights. Can't we put this conversation off? I'm dead tired."

"Well, anyway, just tell me what you think of the old bird."

"To begin with, your father is quite young. I don't know why you refer to him that way. Well, all right, I'll tell you. As I've often said to you, I am very bad at sorting out the various shades of socialism, and I can't see much difference between Bolsheviks and other socialists. Your father is one of those to whom Russia owes its recent disorders and disturbances. He is a revolutionary type, a revolutionary character. Like yourself, he represents the principle of ferment in Russian life."

"Is that meant as praise or blame?"

"Once again, I beg you to put off this discussion to a more convenient time. And I must really draw your attention to your excessive consumption of cocaine. You have been willfully depleting the stock of which I am in charge. You know perfectly well that it is needed for other purposes, as well as that it is a poison and I am responsible for your health."

"You cut the study group again last night. You have an atrophied social sense, just like an illiterate peasant woman or a bourgeois diehard. And yet you are a doctor, you are well read, I believe you even write. How do you explain it?"

"I don't. Apparently it can't be helped. You should be sorry for me."

"Why the mock modesty? If instead of using that sarcastic tone you took the trouble to find out what we do in our classes, you wouldn't be so supercilious."

"Heavens, Liberius Averkievich, I'm not being supercilious. I have the utmost respect for your educational work. I've read the discussion notes you circulate. I know your ideas on the moral improvement of the soldier, they're quite excellent. All you say about what the soldier's attitude should be to the people's army, to his fellows, to the weak, the helpless, to women, and about honor and chastity—it's almost the teaching of the Dukhobors. All that kind of Tolstoyism I know by heart. My own adolescence was full of those aspirations toward a better life. How could I laugh at such things?

"But, first, the idea of social betterment as it is understood since the October revolution doesn't fill me with enthusiasm. Second, it is so far from being put into practice, and the mere talk about it has cost such a sea of blood, that I'm not sure that the end justifies the means. And last—and this is the main thing—when I hear people speak of reshaping life it makes me lose my self-control and I fall into despair.

"Reshaping life! People who can say that have never understood a thing about life—they have never felt its breath, its heartbeat—however much they have seen or done. They look on it as a lump of raw material that needs to be processed by them, to be ennobled by their touch. But life is never a material, a substance to be molded. If you want to know, life is the principle of self-renewal, it is constantly renewing and remaking and changing and transfiguring itself, it is infinitely beyond your or my obtuse theories about it."

"And yet, you know, if you came to our meetings, if you kept in touch with our splendid, our magnificent people, you wouldn't feel half so low. You wouldn't suffer from this melancholia. I know what it comes from. You see us being beaten and you can't see a ray of hope ahead. But one should never panic, my friend. I could tell you much worse things—to do with me personally, not to be made public for the moment—and yet I don't lose my head. Our setbacks are purely temporary, Kolchak is bound to lose in the end. You mark my words. You'll see, we'll win in the long run. So cheer up!"

"It's unspeakable," thought the doctor. "How can anyone be so dense, so childish! I spend my time dinning into him that our ideas are diametrically opposed, he has captured me by force, he is keeping me against my will, and yet he imagines that his setbacks fill me with dismay and that his hopes can cheer me up! How can anyone be as blind as this? For him the fate of the universe is less important than the victory of the revolution."

Yurii Andreievich said nothing, merely shrugging his shoulders and making no secret of his almost uncontrollable exasperation at Liberius's naïveté. Nor did this escape Liberius's notice.

"You are angry, Jupiter, therefore you must be wrong," he said.

"Do, for God's sake, understand once and for all that none of this means anything to me. 'Jupiter' and 'Never panic' and 'Anyone who says A must say B' and 'The Moor has done his work, the Moor can go'—none of these clichés, these vulgar commonplaces, appeal to me. I'll say A but I won't say B— whatever you do. I'll admit that you are Russia's liberators, the shining lights, that without you it would be lost, sunk in misery and ignorance, and I still don't give a damn for any of you, I don't like you and you can all go to the devil.

"The people you worship go in for proverbs, but they've forgotten one proverb—'You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink'—and they've got into the habit of liberating and of showering benefits on just those people who haven't asked for them. I suppose you think I can't imagine anything in the world more pleasant than your camp and your company. I suppose I have to bless you for keeping me a prisoner and thank you for liberating me from my wife, my son, my home, my work, from everything I hold dear and that makes life worth living for me!

"There is a rumor going around that some unknown force—not Russian—has raided and sacked Varykino. Kamennodvorsky doesn't deny it. They say your people and mine managed to escape. Apparently some sort of mythical slit-eyed warriors in padded coats and fur hats crossed the Rynva in a terrible frost, and calmly shot every living soul in the place and vanished as mysteriously as they had come. Do you know anything about it? Is it true?"

"Nonsense. All lies. Groundless rumors."

"If you are as kind and generous as you claim to be when you lecture on the moral improvement of the soldiers, then let me go. I'll go and look for my family—I don't know where they are, I don't even know whether they are alive or dead. And if you won't do that, then shut up, for heaven's sake, and leave me alone, because I am not interested in anything else and I won't answer for myself if you go on. Anyway, the devil take it, haven't I the right to go to sleep?"

Yurii Andreievich lay down flat on the bunk, his face in his pillow, doing his utmost not to listen to Liberius justifying himself and comforting him once more with the prospect of a final victory over the Whites by the spring. The civil war would be over, there would be peace, liberty, and prosperity, and no one would dare to detain the doctor a moment longer. But until then he must be patient. After all they had gone through, and all the sacrifices they had made, and all that time they had been waiting, a few months mattered little, and anyhow, where could the doctor go at present? For his own good he must be prevented from going anywhere alone.

"Just like a phonograph record, the devil!" Yurii Andreievich raged in silent indignation. "He can't stop. Why isn't he ashamed of chewing on the same cud all these years? How can he go on listening to the sound of his own voice, the wretched dopefiend? Day and night he goes on. God, how I hate him! As God is my witness, I'll murder him someday!

"Tonia, my darling, my poor child! Where are you? Are you alive? Dear Lord, she was to have her baby long ago. How did she get through the confinement? Have we got a son or a daughter? My dear ones, what is happening to all of you? Tonia, you are my everlasting reproach. Lara, I daren't speak your name for fear of gasping out my life. O God! God!—And that loathsome, unfeeling brute is still talking! One day he'll go too far and I'll kill him, I'll kill him."

6

The Indian summer was over. It was a clear, golden autumn day. At the western end of Fox's Thicket the wooden turret of a blockhouse built by the Whites showed above the ground. Here Yurii Andreievich had arranged to meet Dr. Lajos, to discuss various service matters. He arrived on time and, waiting for his friend, strolled along the edge of the crumbling earthworks, climbed into the watchtower, and looked out of the slits in front of the now empty machine-gun nests at the wooded distance beyond the river.

The autumn had already clearly marked the frontiers between the coniferous and the deciduous trees. Between the gloomy, bristling walls of almost black pines the leafy thickets shone flame- and wine-colored like medieval towns with painted and gold-roofed palaces built of the timber cut down in the thickness of the forest.

The earth at the doctor's feet, inside the trench and in the ruts of the forest road, was hard with ground frost and heaped with small dry willow leaves, curled up in little scrolls. The autumn smelled of these brown, bitter leaves and of many other things. Greedily he breathed in the mixed peppery smell of frostbitten apples, bitter dry twigs, sweetish damp earth, and the blue September mist that smoked like the fumes of a recently extinguished fire.

He did not hear Lajos come up behind him.

"How are you, colleague?" Lajos said in German. They discussed their business.

"There are three points. First, the court-martial of the vodka brewers; second, the reorganization of the field ambulance and the pharmacy; and third, my proposal for the treatment of mental illnesses. I don't know whether you agree with me, my dear Lajos, but from what I observe we are going mad, and modern forms of insanity spread like an epidemic.

"It's a very interesting question. I'll come to it in a moment. But first I'd like to mention something else. There is unrest in the camp. There is sympathy with the vodka brewers. Moreover, the men are worried about their families who are fleeing from the Whites. As you know, there's a convoy coming, with wives, children, and old people, and many of the partisans have refused to leave the camp until it comes."

"I know. We'll have to wait for them."

"And all this on the eve of the election of a joint commander for our unit and several others, so far independent of us. I think the only candidate is Comrade Liberius. But some of the young people are putting Vdovichenko forward. He is supported by a group, alien to us in spirit, connected with the vodka brewers—sons of shopkeepers and kulaks, deserters from Kolchak. They are particularly restless."

"What do you think will happen to the vodka brewers?"

"I think they will be sentenced to be shot and be reprieved."

"Well, let's get down to business. First, the field ambulance."

"All right. But I must tell you that I am not surprised at your suggestion for preventive psychiatry. I believe in it myself. We are faced with the rise and spread of a form of psychic illness that is typical of our time and is directly related to the contemporary upheavals. We have a case of it in the camp—Pamphil Palykh, a former private in the Tsarist army with a highly developed class instinct and devoted to the revolution. The cause of his trouble is precisely his anxiety for his family in the event of his being killed and of their falling into the hands of the Whites and being made to answer for him. It's a very complex case. I believe his family is one of those who are coming in the convoy. I don't know enough Russian to question him properly. You could find out from Angelar or Kamennodvorsky. He ought to be examined."

"I know Palykh very well. At one time we often came across each other in the army soviet. Swarthy and cruel with a low forehead. I can't think what good you find in him. He was always for extreme measures, harshness, execution. I've always found him repellent. All right, I'll see what I can do about it."

7

It was a clear, sunny day; the weather had been still and dry for a whole week.

The usual rumble of noise hung over the large camp, like the distant roar of the sea. There were footsteps, voices, axes chopping wood, the ringing of anvils, the neighing of horses, the barking of dogs, the crowing of cocks. Crowds of sunburned, smiling men with shining white teeth moved through the forest. Those who knew the doctor nodded to him, others passed him by without a greeting.

The men had refused to leave Fox's Thicket until their families had caught up with them, but now the fugitives were expected shortly and preparations for the move were being made. Things were being cleaned and mended, crates nailed down, carts counted and checked over.

There was a large clearing in the middle of the wood where meetings were often held. It was a sort of mound or barrow on which the grass had been trodden down. A general meeting had been called that day for an important announcement.

Many of the trees in the forest had not yet turned; in its depths they were still fresh and green. The afternoon sun was setting behind the forest, piercing it with its rays, and the leaves, letting them through, glowed green like transparent bottle glass.

In an open space outside his tent Kamennodvorsky, the chief liaison officer, was burning papers, discarded rubbish from General Kappel's records that had fallen into his hands, as well as papers from his own partisan files. The fire with the setting sun behind it was as transparent as the leaves; the flames were invisible and only the waves of shimmering heat showed that something was burning.

Here and there the woods were brilliant with ripe berries—bright tassels of lady's smock, brick-red alderberries, and clusters of viburnum, shimmering from white to purple. Whirring their glassy wings, dragonflies as transparent as the flames and the leaves sailed slowly through the air.

Ever since his childhood Yurii Andreievich had been fond of woods seen at evening against the setting sun. At such moments he felt as if he too were being pierced by shafts of light. It was as though the gift of the living spirit were streaming into his breast, piercing his being and coming out at his shoulders like a pair of wings. The archetype that is formed in every child for life and seems for ever after to be his inward face, his personality, awoke in him in its full primordial strength, and compelled nature, the forest, the afterglow, and everything else visible to be transfigured into a similarly primordial and all-embracing likeness of a girl. Closing his eyes, "Lara," he whispered and thought, addressing the whole of his life, all God's earth, all the sunlit space spread out before him.

But everyday, current reality was still there, Russia was going through the October revolution, and he was a prisoner of the partisans. Absent-mindedly he went up to Kamennodvorsky's bonfire.

"Burning your records? Not finished yet?"

"There's enough of this stuff to burn for days."

The doctor kicked a heap of papers with his foot. It was the White staff headquarters' correspondence. It occurred to him that he might come across some mention of Rantsevich. But all he saw were boring, out-of-date communiqués in code. He kicked another heap. It proved to be an equally dull collection of minutes of partisan meetings. A paper on top of the pile said: "Extra urgent. Re-furloughs. Re-election of members of draft board. Current business. In view of the fact that the charges against the schoolmistress of the village Ignatodvortsy have not been substantiated, the army soviet proposes ..."

Kamennodvorsky took a piece of paper from his pocket and handed it to the doctor.

"Here are your marching orders for the medical unit. The convoy with the partisans' families is quite near and the dissensions inside the camp will be settled by this evening, so we can expect to move any day now."

The doctor glanced at the paper and groaned:

"But you're giving me less transportation than last time and there are all those extra wounded. Those who can will have to walk; there are only a few of these. What am I to do with the stretcher cases? And the stores and the bedding and the equipment?"

"You'll have to manage somehow. We must adjust ourselves to circumstances. Now another thing. It's a request from all of us. Will you have a look at a comrade of ours—tried, tested, devoted to the cause and a splendid soldier. There's something wrong with him."

"Palykh? Lajos told me."

"Yes. Go to see him. Examine him."

"He's a mental case?"

"I suppose so. He says he sees will-o'-the-wisps. Hallucinations, evidently. Insomnia. Headaches."

"All right, I might as well go and see him now, since I'm free at the moment. When does the meeting begin?"

"I think they're coming now. But why bother? As you see, I'm not going either. They'll manage without us."

"Then I'll go and see Pamphil. Though I can hardly keep my eyes open, I'm so sleepy. Liberius Averkievich likes to philosophize at night, and he's worn me out with his talk. Where do I find Pamphil?"

"You know the birch grove beyond the rubbish pit?"

"Yes, I think I know it."

"You'll find some commanders' tents in a clearing. We've put one of them at Pamphil's disposal. He's got his family coming, they're in the convoy. That's where you'll find him—in one of the tents—he's got battalion commander status as a reward for revolutionary merit."

8

On his way to see Pamphil, the doctor was overcome with fatigue. It was the cumulative effect of several sleepless nights. He could go back to his dugout and lie down, but he was afraid of staying there, for at any moment Liberius might come in and disturb him. He stopped in a glade scattered with golden leaves from the surrounding woods. They lay in a checkerboard pattern, and so did the low rays of the sun falling on their golden carpet. This double, crisscross brightness made your head spin and sent you to sleep like small print or a monotonous murmur.

The doctor lay down on the silkily rustling leaves, his head on his arm and his arm on a pillow of moss at the foot of a tree. He dozed off at once. The dazzle of light and shadow that had put him to sleep now covered him with its patchwork so that his body, stretched on the ground, was indistinguishable from the kaleidoscopic brilliance of the rays and leaves, invisible as if he had put on a magic cap.

But soon the very force of his desire and need for sleep aroused him. Direct causes operate only within certain limits; beyond them they produce the opposite effect. His wakeful consciousness, not finding any rest, worked feverishly of its own momentum. Thoughts whirled and wheeled inside his head, his mind was knocking like a faulty engine. This inner confusion worried and exasperated him, "That swine Liberius," he thought indignantly. "As if there weren't enough things in the world to drive people mad, he has to take a sane man and turn him deliberately into a neurotic by keeping him a prisoner and boring him with his friendship and chatter. Someday I'll kill him."

Folding and unfolding like a scrap of colored stuff, a brown speckled butterfly flew across the sunny side of the clearing. The doctor watched it sleepily. Choosing a background with a color like its own, it settled on the brown speckled bark of a pine and became indistinguishable from it, vanishing as completely as Yurii Andreievich, hidden by the play of light and shadow, had vanished.

His mind turned to its accustomed round of thoughts—he had touched on them indirectly in many medical works—concerning will and purposefulness as superior forms of adaptation; mimicry and protective coloring; the survival of the fittest; and the hypothesis that the path of natural selection is the very path leading to the formation and emergence of consciousness. And what was subject? What was object? How was their identity to be defined? In the doctor's reflections, Darwin was next to Schelling, the butterfly that had just flown by next to modern painting and Impressionist art. He thought of creation, the creature, creativeness, the instincts of creation and simulation.

Once again he fell asleep but woke up a moment later. A soft, muffled conversation near by had disturbed him. The few words he overheard were enough to tell him that it concerned some secret and illicit plan. He had not been seen, the conspirators had no suspicion of his presence. The slightest movement that would betray it now might cost him his life. Yurii Andreievich remained quiet and listened.

Some of the voices he recognized. They were those of the scum of the partisans, hangers-on such as Goshka, Sanka, Koska, and their usual follower Terentii Galuzin, young good-for-nothings who were at the bottom of every kind of outrage and disorder. Zakhar Gorazdykh was also there, an even more sinister personality who was mixed up in the affair of the vodka brewing but was not being prosecuted just now because he had denounced the chief offenders. What surprised Yurii Andreievich was the presence of Sivobluy, a partisan of the crack "Silver Company" who was one of the commander's bodyguards. In keeping with a tradition going back to Stenka Razin and Pugachev, this favorite, known to be in the confidence of the chief, was nicknamed "The Hetman's Ear." And yet he too seemed to be in the conspiracy.

The plotters were negotiating with delegates from the advanced positions of the enemy. The delegates were inaudible, so softly did they speak to the traitors, and Yurii Andreievich could only guess that they were speaking when an occasional silence seemed to interrupt the whispering.

Zakhar Gorazdykh, the drunkard, was doing most of the talking, cursing every other moment in his hoarse, wheezing voice. He seemed to be the ringleader.

"Now, you others, listen. The chief thing is, we've got to keep it quiet. If anybody talks—you see this knife?—I'll rip his guts. Is that clear? Now you know as well as I do—we're stuck. There's no way out for us. We've got to earn our pardon. We've got to work such a trick as nobody's seen before. They want him taken alive. Now they say their boss Gulevoy is coming." (They corrected him—"Galiullin"—but he did not catch the name and said "General Galeiev.") "That's our chance. There won't be another like it. Here're their delegates. They'll tell you all about it. They say we've got to take him alive. Now you tell them, you others."

Now the others, the delegates, began to speak. Yurii Andreievich could not catch a word, but from the length of the pause he judged that they explained the proposal in detail. Then Gorazdykh spoke again.

"Hear that, boys? You see what a nice fellow he is. Why should we pay for him? He isn't even a man—he's a half-wit of some sort, a monk or a hermit. You stop grinning, Terioshka. I'll give you something to grin about, you stupid ass. I wasn't talking about you. I'm telling you—he's a hermit, that's what he is. Let him have his way and he'll turn you all into monks—eunuchs. What does he tell you? No cursing, no getting drunk, all this stuff about women. How can you live like that? Tonight we'll get him down to the ford. I'll see that he comes. Then we'll all fall on him together. It won't be hard. That's nothing. What's difficult is that they want him alive. Tie him up, they say. Well, if it doesn't work out that way I'll deal with him myself, I'll finish him off with my own hands. They'll send their people along to help."

He went on explaining the plan, but gradually they moved away and the doctor ceased to hear them.

"That's Liberius they're plotting to hand over to the Whites or to kill, the swine," he thought with horror and indignation, forgetting how often he had himself wished his tormentor dead. How was it to be prevented? He decided to go back to Kamennodvorsky and tell him of the plot without mentioning any names, and also to warn Liberius.

But when he got back, Kamennodvorsky had gone; only his assistant was keeping an eye on the smoldering fire to prevent its spreading.

The crime did not take place. It was forestalled. The conspiracy, as it turned out, was known. That day the details were disclosed and the plotters seized. Sivobluy had played the role of agent provocateur. Yurii Andreievich felt even more disgusted.

9

It was learned that the partisans' families were now within two days' journey of the camp. The partisans were getting ready to welcome them and soon afterwards to move on. Yurii Andreievich went to Pamphil Palykh.

He found him at the entrance to his tent, an ax in his hand. In front of him was a tall heap of birch saplings; he had cut them down but had not yet stripped them. Some had fallen where they stood and, toppling with their whole weight, had dug the sharp ends of their broken branches into the damp ground. Others he had dragged from a short distance and piled on top of the rest. Shuddering and swaying on their springy branches, these trees lay neither on the ground nor close together. It seemed as though with outstretched arms they were fending off Pamphil, who had cut them down, and that their tangled green foliage was barring his way to his tent.

"It's for my dear guests," explained Pamphil. "My wife and children. The tent is too low. And the rain comes through. I've cut these down for joints to make a roof."

"I shouldn't count on their allowing you to have them in your tent, Pamphil. Who has ever heard of civilians, women and children, being allowed to live inside a camp? They'll stay with the wagons somewhere just outside, you'll be able to see them as much as you like in your spare time, but I shouldn't think they'd be allowed to live in your tent. But that isn't what I've come about. They tell me you're getting thin, you can't eat or sleep. Is that true? I must say you look all right. Though you could do with a haircut."

Pamphil was a huge man with black tousled hair and beard and a bumpy forehead that looked double; a thickening of the frontal bone, like a ring or a steel band pressed over his temples, gave him a beetling, glowering look.

When at the beginning of the revolution it had been feared that, as in 1905, the upheaval would be a short-lived episode in the history of the educated upper classes and leave the deeper layers of society untouched, everything possible had been done to spread revolutionary propaganda among the people to upset them, to stir them up and lash them into fury.

In those early days, men like Pamphil Palykh, who needed no encouragement to hate intellectuals, officers, and gentry with a savage hatred, were regarded by enthusiastic left-wing intellectuals as a rare find and greatly valued. Their inhumanity seemed a marvel of class-consciousness, their barbarism a model of proletarian firmness and revolutionary instinct. By such qualities Pamphil had established his fame, and he was held in great esteem by partisan chiefs and Party leaders.

To Yurii Andreievich this gloomy and unsociable giant, soulless and narrow-minded, seemed subnormal, almost a degenerate.

"Come into the tent," said Pamphil.

"No, why? It's pleasanter out in the open. Anyway, I couldn't get in."

"All right. Have it your own way. After all, it is a stinking hole. We can sit on the trees."

They sat down on the springy birch saplings, and Pamphil told the doctor the story of his life. "They say a tale is soon told. But mine is a long story. I couldn't tell it in three years. I don't know where to begin.

"Well, I'll try. My wife and I, we were young. She looked after the house. I worked in the fields. It wasn't a bad life. We had children. They drafted me into the army. They sent me to the war. Well, the war. What should I tell you about the war? You've seen it, Comrade Doctor. Then the revolution. I saw the light. The soldiers' eyes were opened. Not the Fritzes, who are Germans, were the enemies, but some of our own people. 'Soldiers of the world revolution, down your rifles, go home, get the bourgeois!' And so on. You know it all yourself, Comrade Army Doctor. Well, to go on. Then came the civil war. I joined the partisans. Now I'll have to leave out a lot or I'll never end. After all that, what do I see now, at the present moment? That parasite, he's brought up the two Stavropolsky regiments from the Russian front, and the first Orenburg Cossack as well. I'm not a child am I? Don't I understand? Haven't I served in the army? We're in trouble, Doctor, it's all up with us. What he wants to do, the swine, is to fall on us with all that scum. He wants to surround us.

"But I've got a wife and children. If he comes out on top, how will they get away? They're innocent, of course, they have nothing to do with it, but this won't stop him. He'll tie up my wife with a rope and he'll torture her to death on my account, my wife and my children, he'll break every bone in their bodies, he'll tear them apart. And you ask, why don't I sleep. A man could be made of iron, but a thing like that is to make you lose your mind."

"What an odd fellow you are, Pamphil. I can't make you out. For years you've been away from them, you didn't even know where they were and you didn't worry. Now you're going to see them in a day or two, and instead of being happy about it you act as though it were their funeral."

"That was before, now it's different. He's beating us, the White bastard. Anyway, it isn't me we're talking about. I'll soon be dead. But I can't take my little ones with me into the next world, can I? They'll stay and they'll fall into his dirty paws. He'll squeeze the blood out of them, drop by drop."

"Is that why you see will-o'-the-wisps? I was told you keep seeing things."

"Well, Doctor, I haven't told you everything. I've kept back the most important thing. Now, I'll tell you the whole truth if you want it, I'll say it to your face, but you mustn't hold it against me.

"I've done away with a lot of your kind, there's a lot of officers' blood on my hands. Officers, bourgeois. And it's never worried me. Spilled it like water. Names and numbers all gone out of my head. But there's one little fellow I can't get out of my mind. I killed that youngster and I can't forget it. Why did I have to kill him? He made me laugh, and I killed him for a joke, for nothing, like a fool.

"During the February revolution that was. Under Kerensky. We were having a mutiny. We were near a railway station. We'd left the front. They sent a young fellow, an agitator, to talk us into going back. To fight on to victory. Well, that little cadet came to talk us into being good. Just like a chicken, he was. 'Fight on to victory'—that was his slogan. He got up on a water butt shouting that slogan, the water butt was on the railway platform. He got up there, you see, so as to make his call to battle come from higher up, and suddenly the lid turned upside down under him and he fell right in. Right into the water. You can't think how funny he looked. Made me split my sides laughing! I was holding a rifle. And I was laughing my head off. Couldn't stop. It was just as if he was tickling me. And then, I aimed and fired and killed him on the spot. I can't think how it happened. Just as though somebody had pushed me.

"Well, that's my will-o'-the-wisp. I see that station at night. At the time it was funny, but now I'm sorry."

"Was that at Biriuchi station near the town of Meliuzeievo?"

"Can't remember."

"Were you in the Zybushino rebellion?"

"Can't remember."

"Which front were you at? Was it the western front? Were you in the west?"

"Somewhere like that. It could have been in the west. I can't remember."

TWELVE

The Rowan Tree

 

The convoy with the partisans' families, complete with children and belongings, had long been following the main partisan force. After it, behind the wagons, came vast herds of cattle, mainly cows—several thousand of them.

With the arrival of the womenfolk a new figure appeared in the camp. This was Zlydarikha or Kubarikha, a soldier's wife who was a cattle healer, a veterinarian, and also, secretly, a witch. She went about in a little pancake hat cocked on her head and a pea-green Royal Scots Fusiliers overcoat, which formed part of the British equipment supplied to the Supreme Ruler, and she assured everyone that she had made them out of a prisoner's cap and uniform. She said that the Reds had liberated her from the Kezhemsk jail where for some unknown reason Kolchak had kept her.

The partisans had now moved to a new campground. They were supposed to stay there only until the neighborhood had been reconnoitered and suitable winter quarters found. But as a result of unforeseen developments they were to spend the winter there.

This new camp was quite unlike the old one. The forest around it was a dense, impenetrable taiga. On one side, away from the camp and the highway, there was no end to it. In the early days, while the tents were being pitched and Yurii Andreievich had more leisure, he had explored the forest in several directions and found that one could easily get lost in it. Two places had struck him in the course of these excursions and remained in his memory.

One was at the edge of the taiga, just outside the camp. The forest was autumnally bare, so that you could see into it as through an open gate; here a splendid, solitary, rust-colored rowan tree had alone kept its leaves. Growing on a mound that rose above the low, squelchy, hummocky marsh, it reached into the sky holding up the flat round shields of its hard crimson berries against the leaden, late-autumn sky. Small birds with feathers as bright as frosty dawns—bullfinches and tomtits—settled on the rowan tree and picked the largest berries, stretching out their necks and throwing back their heads to swallow them.

There seemed to be a living intimacy between the birds and the tree, as if it had watched them for a long time refusing to do anything, but in the end had had pity on them and given in and fed them like a nurse unbuttoning her blouse to give breast to a baby. "Well, all right, all right," it seemed to be saying with a smile, "eat me, have your fill."

The other place was even more remarkable. This was on a height that fell off steeply on one side. Looking down, you felt that at the bottom of the escarpment there should be something different from what was on top—a stream or a hollow or a wild field overgrown with seedy, uncut grass. But in fact it was a repetition of the same thing, only at a giddy depth, as if the forest had simply sunk to a lower level with all its trees, so that the treetops were now underfoot. There must have been a landslide there at some time.

It was as if the grim, gigantic forest, marching at cloud level, had stumbled, lost its footing, and hurtled down, all in one piece, and would have dropped right through the earth if it had not, by a miracle, saved itself at the last moment—so that there it was now, safe and sound, rustling below.

But what made the high place in the forest remarkable was something else. All along its edge it was locked in by granite boulders standing on end, looking like the flat stones of prehistoric dolmens. When Yurii Andreievich came across this stony platform for the first time, he was ready to swear that it was not of natural origin, that it bore the mark of human hands. It might well have been the site of an ancient pagan shrine, where prayers and sacrifices had once been offered by unknown worshippers.

It was here that the death sentence against eleven ringleaders of the conspiracy and two male nurses condemned for brewing vodka was executed one cold, sullen morning.

Twenty of the most loyal partisans, including a core of the commander's bodyguard, brought the condemned men to the spot. Then the escort closed around them in a semicircle, rifle in hand, and advancing at a quick, jostling pace drove them to the edge of the platform, where there was no way out except over the precipice.

As a result of questioning, long imprisonment, and maltreatment they had lost their human appearance. Black, hairy, and haggard, they were as terrible as ghosts.

They had been disarmed when they were arrested, and it had not even occurred to anyone to search them again before the execution. Such a search would have seemed superfluous and vile, a cruel mockery of men so close to death.

But now, suddenly, Rzhanitsky, a friend of Vdovichenko, who walked beside him and who, like him, was an old anarchist, fired three shots at the guards, aiming at Sivobluy. He was an excellent marksman but his hand shook in his excitement and he missed. Once again, tactfulness and pity for their former comrades kept the guards from falling on him or shooting him down at once for his attempt. Rzhanitsky had three unspent bullets left in his revolver, but maddened by his failure and perhaps, in his agitation, forgetting that they were there, he flung his Browning against the rocks. It went off a fourth time, wounding one of the condemned men, Pachkolia, in the foot.

Pachkolia cried out, clutched his foot, and fell, screaming with pain. The two men nearest him, Pafnutkin and Gorazdykh, raised him and dragged him by the arms, so that he should not be trampled to death by his comrades, who no longer knew what they were doing. Unable to put down his wounded foot, Pachkolia hopped and limped toward the rocky ledge where the doomed men were being driven, and he screamed without stopping. His inhuman shrieks were infectious. As though at a given signal, everyone lost his self-control. An indescribable scene followed. The men swore loudly, begged for mercy, prayed and cursed.

The young Galuzin, who still wore his yellow-braided school cap, removed it, fell on his knees, and, still kneeling, edged backward following the rest of the crowd toward the terrible stones. Bowing repeatedly to the ground before the guards and crying loudly, he chanted, quite beside himself:

"Forgive me, comrades, I'm sorry, I won't do it again, please let me off. Don't kill me. I haven't lived yet. I want to live a little longer, I want to see my mother just once more. Please let me off, comrades, please forgive me. I'll do anything for you. I'll kiss the ground under your feet. Oh, help, help, Mother, I'm done for!"

Someone else, hidden in the crowd, chanted:

"Good comrades, kind comrades! Is this possible? In two wars we fought together! We stood up and fought for the same things! Let us off, comrades, have pity on us. We'll repay your kindness, we'll be grateful to you all our lives, we will prove it to you. Are you deaf, or what? Why don't you answer? Aren't you Christians?"

Others screamed at Sivobluy:

"Judas! Christ-killer! If we are traitors, you are a traitor three times over, you dog, may you be strangled. You killed your lawful Tsar, to whom you took your oath, you swore loyalty to us and you betrayed us. Go ahead, kiss your Forester, that devil, before you betray him! You'll betray him too!"

Even at the edge of the grave Vdovichenko remained true to himself. His head high, his gray hair streaming in the wind, he spoke to Rzhanitsky as one fellow anarchist to another, in a voice loud enough to be heard by all:

"Don't humble yourself! Your protest will not reach them. These new oprichniki[17] these master executioners of the new torture chambers, will never understand you! But don't lose heart. History will tell the truth. Posterity will pillory the Bourbons of the commissarocracy together with their dirty deeds. We die as martyrs for our ideals at the dawn of the world revolution. Long live the revolution of the spirit! Long live world anarchy!"

A volley of twenty shots, discharged at some inaudible command caught only by the riflemen, mowed down half the condemned men, killing most of them outright. The rest were shot down by another salvo. The boy, Terioshka Galuzin, twitched longest, but finally he too lay still.

2

The idea of moving to another place, farther east, for the winter was not given up easily. Patrols were sent out to survey the country beyond the highway, along the Vytsk-Kezhemsk watershed. Liberius was often absent, leaving the doctor to himself.

But it was too late for the partisans to move and they had nowhere to go to. This was the time of their worst setbacks. Shortly before they were finally crushed, the Whites, resolving to destroy the irregular forest units once and for all, had encircled them and were pressing them from every side. The position would have been catastrophic for the partisans had the radius of the encirclement been smaller. They were saved by its size, for the approaching winter made the taiga impenetrable and prevented the enemy from pulling his ring tighter.

To move, however, had become impossible. They could, indeed, have broken through to new positions had any plan offered specific military advantages. But no such definite plan had been worked out. The men were at the end of their tether. The junior officers lost heart and with it their influence over their subordinates. Senior commanders met nightly in council and proposed conflicting solutions. The idea of shifting camp had finally to be abandoned in favor of fortifying the present positions in the heart of the taiga. Their advantage was that the deep snow made them inaccessible, particularly because the Whites were ill supplied with skis. The immediate task was to dig in and lay in large supplies.

Bisiurin, the camp quartermaster, reported an acute shortage of flour and potatoes. Cattle, however, were plentiful and he foresaw that the staple food in winter would be milk and meat.

There was a shortage of winter clothing; many of the partisans went about half dressed. All the dogs in the camp were strangled, and people with experience as furriers were set to making dog-skin jackets, to be worn fur side out.

The doctor was denied the use of transportation. The carts were kept for more important needs. The last time the partisans had moved camp the wounded were carried thirty miles on stretchers.

The only medicines he had left were quinine, Glauber's salts, and iodine. The iodine was in the form of crystals and had to be dissolved in alcohol before it could be used for dressings or operations. The destruction of the vodka still was now regretted, and those of the brewers who had been acquitted at the trial as less guilty than the rest were told to mend it or construct a new one. The manufacture of alcohol was resumed for medical purposes. When this became known in the camp, people exchanged meaningful glances and shook their heads. Drunkenness broke out again, and contributed to the general demoralization.

The alcohol produced was almost 100 proof. At this strength it was suitable for dissolving crystals and also for preparing tincture of quinine, which was used in the treatment of typhus when it reappeared at the onset of the cold weather.

3

At this time the doctor went to see Pamphil and his family. His wife and children had spent the whole of the past summer as fugitives on dusty roads under the open sky. They were thoroughly frightened by the horrors they had gone through, and they anticipated new ones. Their endless wanderings had marked them indelibly. Pamphil's wife, two daughters, and little son had light hair, faded to a flaxen color by the sun, and bristling eyebrows, white against their tanned and weather-beaten faces. But while the children were too young to bear the marks of their experiences, the mother's face had become lifeless. Strain and fear had narrowed her lips to a thread and frozen her dry, regular features in a rigid expression of suffering and defensiveness.

Pamphil was devoted to all of them and loved his children to distraction. He surprised the doctor by his skill in carving toy rabbits, cocks, and bears for them, using a corner of his finely sharpened ax blade.

With the arrival of his family he had cheered up and begun to recover. But now the news had got about that the presence of the families was considered bad for discipline, and they were going to be sent, under proper escort, to winter quarters at some distance from the camp, which would thus be relieved of its burden of civilian refugees. There was more talk about this plan than actual preparation, and the doctor thought it would never be carried out, but Pamphil's spirits fell and his hallucinations came back.

4

Before winter finally set in, the camp went through a period of disturbances—anxieties, uncertainties, confused, threatening situations, and a number of weird incidents.

The Whites had completed the encirclement according to plan. They were headed by Generals Vitsyn, Quadri, and Bassalygo, who were known far and wide for their harshness and unyielding resolution, and whose names alone terrified the refugees inside the camp as well as the peaceful population remaining in its native villages at the rear of the encircling troops.

As we have said, the enemy had no means of tightening his grip, so the partisans had no reason to worry on this account; on the other hand, it was impossible for them to remain inactive. They realized that passive acceptance of their plight would strengthen enemy morale. However safe they were inside their trap, they had to attempt a sortie, even if only as a military demonstration.

A strong force was set aside for this purpose and concentrated against the western arc of the circle. After several days' hard fighting, the partisans defeated the Whites and broke through to their rear.

This breach opened a way to the camp in the taiga, and through it poured a stream of new refugees. Not all of these were related to the partisans. Terrified by the punitive measures of the Whites, all the peasants of the surrounding countryside had fled from their homes and now sought to join the partisans, whom they regarded as their natural protectors.

But the camp, anxious to get rid of its own dependents, had no place for newcomers and strangers. Men were sent to meet the fugitives and to divert them to a village on the river Chilimka. The village was called Dvory ("farms") because of the farmsteads that had grown up around its mill. There it was proposed to settle the refugees for the winter and to send the supplies that were allotted to them.

While these steps were being taken, however, events followed their own course and the camp command could not always cope with them.

The enemy had closed the breach in his positions and the partisan unit that had broken through was now unable to get back into the taiga.

Also, the women refugees were getting out of hand. It was easy to lose one's way in the taiga. The men sent out to turn back the refugees often missed them, and the women flooded into the forest, chopping down trees, building roads and bridges, and achieving prodigies of resourcefulness.

All this was counter to the intentions of the partisan command, working havoc with the plan made by Liberius.

5

That was why he was in such a temper as he stood talking to the trapper, Svirid, near the highway, which came close to the edge of the taiga at this point. Several of his officers stood on the highway, arguing about whether to cut the telegraph line that ran along the road. Liberius would have the final word, but he was deep in conversation with the trapper and kept signalling to the others to wait for him.

Svirid had been deeply shocked by the shooting of Vdovichenko, whose only crime had been that his influence rivalled that of Liberius and brought dissension into the camp. Svirid wished he could leave the partisans and go back to his old, private, independent life. But this was out of the question. He had made his choice, and were he to leave his Forest Brothers now he would be executed as a deserter.

The weather was the worst imaginable. A sharp, scudding wind swept torn, low clouds as black as flying soot before it. Snow would suddenly fall from them with a convulsive, insane haste. In a moment the broad expanse of the earth was covered with a white blanket. The next minute, the white blanket was consumed, melted completely, and the earth emerged as black as coal under the black sky splashed with slanting streaks of distant showers. The earth could not absorb any more water. Then the clouds would part like windows, as though to air the sky, which shimmered with a cold, glassy white brilliance. The stagnant, unabsorbed water on the ground responded by opening the windows of its pools and puddles, shimmering with the same brilliance. The vapors skidded like smoke over the pine woods; their resinous needles were as waterproof as oilcloth. Raindrops were strung on the telegraph wires like beads one next to the other without ever falling.

Svirid was one of those who had been sent to meet the women refugees. He wanted to tell his chief about the things he had seen, about the confusion resulting from conflicting orders, none of which could be carried out, and about the atrocities committed by the weakest elements of the female hordes, the first to succumb to despair. Trudging on foot, loaded with sacks, bundles, and babies, young mothers who had lost their milk, driven out of their minds by the horrors of the journey, abandoned their children, shook the corn out of their sacks onto the ground, and turned back. A quick death, they had decided, was preferable to a slow death by starvation. Better to fall into the clutches of the enemy than to be torn to pieces by some beast in the forest.

Other women, the strongest, were models of courage and self-control, unsurpassed by men. Svirid had many other things to tell his chief. He wanted to warn him of an impending new rebellion, more dangerous than the one that had been put down, but Liberius, by hurrying him, deprived him of the power of speech. Liberius kept interrupting Svirid not only because his friends were calling and waving to him from the highway, but because during the past two weeks he had been given similar warnings time and again, and by now he knew them by heart.

"Give me time, Comrade Chief. I am no good at finding words. They stick in my throat, they choke me. What I say is this, go to the refugee camp and tell those women to stop their nonsense. Otherwise, I ask you, what is this supposed to be—'All against Kolchak!' or a civil war among the women?"

"Get on with it, Svirid. You see I'm wanted. Don't spin it out."

"And now there's that she-devil, Zlydarikha, God only knows what she is. She says: 'Put me down as a woman ventilator to look after the cattle.…' "

"Veterinary, you mean."

"That's what I say—a woman ventilator to cure cattle of wind. But she's not looking after cattle now, such a heretic, devil's reverend mother she has turned out to be, she says cows' masses, and turns young refugee wives from their duty. 'You've only yourselves to blame for your miseries,' she says to them. 'That's what comes of hitching up your skirts and running after the Red flag. Don't do it again.' "

"What refugees are you talking about—ours, from the camp, or some other kind?"

"The others, of course. The new ones, the strangers."

"But they had orders to go to Dvory. How have they got here?"

"Dvory! That's a good one. Your Dvory's burned out, mill and all, nothing left of it but cinders. That's what they saw when they came by—not a living thing. Half of them went crazy, yelled and howled and turned straight back to the Whites, and the other half turned this way."

"But how do they get through the taiga, through the swamps?"

"What are saws and axes for? Some of our men, who were sent to guard them, helped them a bit. Twenty miles of road they've cut, they say. Bridges and all, the brutes! Talk about women! They've done things that would take us a month of Sundays!"

"That's a fine thing, twenty miles of road! And what are you looking so pleased about, you jackass? That's just what the Whites want, a highway into the taiga! Now all they have to do is to roll in their artillery!"

"Send a force to guard the road."

"I can do my own thinking, thank you."

6

The days were getting shorter; it was dark by five. Toward dusk Yurii Andreievich crossed the highway at the very place where Liberius had stood talking to Svirid a few days earlier. He was on his way back to the camp. Near the clearing where the mound and the rowan tree marked the camp boundary, he heard the bold, challenging voice of Kubarikha, his "rival" as he jokingly called the cattle healer. She was singing a gay jingle and her voice had a raucous, boisterous screech in it. Judging by the peals of approving laughter that kept interrupting her, there was a crowd of men and women listening. Then came silence. The people must have dispersed.

Thinking herself alone, Kubarikha sang a different song, softly, as if to herself. Yurii Andreievich, who was cautiously making his way in the dusk along the footpath that skirted the swamp in front of the rowan tree, stopped in his tracks. Kubarikha was singing an old Russian song, but he did not know it. Or she was improvising it?

An old Russian folk song is like water held back by a dam. It looks as if it were still and were no longer flowing, but in its depths it is ceaselessly rushing through the sluice gates and the stillness of its surface is deceptive. By every possible means, by repetitions and similes, the song slows down the gradual unfolding of its theme. Then at some point it suddenly reveals itself and astounds us. That is how the song's sorrowing spirit comes to expression. The song is an insane attempt to stop time by means of its words.

Kubarikha half sang and half recited:

 

"As a hare was running about the wide world,

About the wide world, "over the white snow,

He ran, the lop-eared hare, past a rowan tree,

Past a rowan tree, and complained to it:

Have I not, he said, a timorous heart,

A timorous heart, so faint and weak?

I am frightened, he said, of the wild beast's tracks,

Wild beast's tracks, the wolf's hungry belly.

Pity me, O rowan bush! O fair rowan tree!

Do not give thy beauty to the wicked enemy,

The wicked enemy, the wicked raven.

Scatter thy red berries to the wind,

To the wind, over the wide world, over the white snow.

Fling them, roll them to my native town,

To the far end of the street, the last house,

The last house in the street, the last window, the room

Where she has shut herself in,

My beloved, my longed-for love.

Whisper to my grieving love, my bride,

A warm, an ardent word.

I, a soldier, languish in captivity,

Homesick, I am, poor soldier, kept in foreign parts.

I'll break from durance bitter,

I'll go to my red berry, to my lovely bride."

 

7

Agafia Fotievna, Pamphil's wife, had brought her sick cow to Kubarikha. The cow had been separated from the herd and tethered to a tree by a rope tied to her horns. Her mistress sat on a tree stump by the cow's forelegs and Kubarikha, on a milking stool, by her hind legs.

The rest of the countless herd was crammed into a glade, hemmed in all around by the dark forest of triangular firs, as tall as hills and rising from their spreading lower branches as if they were squatting on fat bottoms on the ground.

The cows were mostly black with white spots and belonged to some Swiss breed popular in Siberia. They were exhausted, no less exhausted than their owners by privations, endless wandering, and intolerable crowding. Rubbing flank to flank and maddened by the lack of space, they forgot their sex and reared and climbed on top of one another, pulling up their heavy udders with an effort and roaring like bulls. The heifers who were covered by them broke away from underneath and rushed off into the forest, tails in the air and trampling shrubs and branches. Their herdsmen—old men and children—ran shrieking after them.

And as if they too were hemmed in by the tight circle of treetops in the winter sky above the glade, the black and white clouds reared and piled and toppled as chaotically as the cows.

The knot of curious onlookers who stood at a distance annoyed the witch, and she measured them from top to toe with a hostile look. But, vain as an artist, she felt that it was beneath her dignity to admit that they embarrassed her. She pretended not to notice them. The doctor watched her from the back of the crowd, where she could not see him.

This was the first time he took a good look at her. She wore her usual English cap and pea-green overcoat with its crumpled collar. But the haughty and passionate expression that gave a youthful fire and darkness to this aging woman's eyes showed plainly that she did not care in the least what she was wearing or not wearing.

What astonished Yurii Andreievich was the change in Pamphil's wife. He could scarcely recognize her. In the last few days she had aged terribly. Her goggling eyes were almost ready to pop out of their sockets and her neck was as thin and long as a cart shaft. Such was the effect upon her of her secret fears.

"She doesn't give any milk, my dear," she was saying. "I thought she might be in calf, but then she would have had milk by now and she still hasn't any."

"Why should she be in calf? You can see the scab of anthrax on her udder. I'll give you some herb ointment to rub it with. And of course I'll cast a spell on her."

"My other trouble is my husband."

"I'll charm him back, so he won't stray. That's easy. He'll stick to you so you won't be able to get rid of him. What's your third trouble?"

"It isn't that he strays. That would be nothing. The misfortune is that he clings to me and the children with all his might, and that breaks his heart. I know what he thinks. He thinks they'll separate the camps, that they will send us one way and him another. And that we'll fall into the hands of Bassalygo's men and he won't be there and we won't have anyone to stand up for us. And that they'll torture us, they'll rejoice in our torments. I know his thoughts. I'm afraid he'll do away with himself."

"I'll think about it. I'll find a way to end your grief. What's your third trouble?"

"I haven't a third one. That's all there is—my cow and my husband."

"Well, you are poor in sorrows, my dear. See how merciful God has been to you! Such as you are hard to find. Only two sorrows in your poor heart, and one of them a fond husband! Well, let's begin. What will you give me for the cow?"

"What will you take?"

"I'll have a loaf of bread and your husband."

The onlookers burst out laughing.

"Are you joking?"

"Too much, is it? All right, I'll do without the loaf. We'll settle for your husband."

The laughter grew louder.

"What's the name? Not your husband's, your cow's."

"Beauty."

"Half the herd is called that. All right. We'll start with God's blessing."

She recited the spell for the cow. At first she was indeed concerned with the cow, but after a while she got carried away and gave Agafia a whole set of instructions on witchcraft. Yurii Andreievich listened spellbound, just as, when he first arrived in Siberia from European Russia, he had listened to the florid chatter of the driver, Bacchus.

The woman was saying:

"Aunt Margesta, come and be our guest. Come on Wednesday, take away the pest, take away the spell, take away the scab. Ringworm, leave the heifer's udder. Stand still, Beauty, do your duty, don't upset the pail. Stand still as a hill, let milk run and rill. Terror, terror, show your mettle, take the scab, throw them in the nettle. Strong as a lord is the sorcerer's word.

"You see, Agafia, you have to know everything—bidding and forbidding, the word for escaping and the word for safekeeping. Now you, for example, you look over there and you say to yourself: 'There's a forest.' But what there is over there is the forces of evil fighting the angelic host—they're at war like your men with Bassalygo's.

"Or take another example, look over there where I'm pointing. You're looking the wrong way, my dear, use your eyes, not the back of your head, look where my finger is pointing. That's right! Now, what do you think that is? You think it's two twigs that the wind has tangled together? Or a bird building its nest? Well, it isn't either. That thing is a real devil's work, a garland the water spirit started weaving for her daughter. She heard people coming by, that frightened her, so she left it half done, but she'll finish it one of these nights, you will see.

"Or again, take your red banner. You think it's a flag, isn't that what you think? Well, it isn't a flag. It's the purple kerchief of the death woman, she uses it for luring. And why for luring? She waves it and she nods and winks and lures young men to come and be killed, then she send famine and plague. That's what it is. And you went and believed her. You thought it was a flag. You thought it was: 'Come to me, all ye poor and proletarians of the world.'

"You have to know everything these days, Agafia my girl, every single thing. What every bird is and every stone and every herb. That bird, for example, that's a starling. And that beast is a badger.

"Now, another thing, suppose you take a fancy to someone, you just tell me. I'll make him pine for you, whoever he is—your Forester, the one who is your chief, if you like, or Kolchak or Ivan Tsarevich—anyone. You think I'm boasting? I am not. Now look, I'll tell you. When winter comes with blizzards and whirlwinds and snowspouts chasing each other in the fields, I will stick a knife into such a pillar of snow, right up to the hilt, and when I take it out of the snow, it will be red with blood. Have you ever heard of such a thing? Well, there you are! And you thought I was boasting. Now, how can it be, you tell me, that blood should come out of a snowspout that is made only of wind and snow? That's just it, my dear, that whirlwind isn't just wind and snow, it's a were-wolf, a changeling that's lost its little bewitched child and is looking for it, it goes about the fields crying and looking for it. That is what I struck with my knife, that is why there is blood on it. Now, with that knife I can cut away the footprint of any man, and I can sew it with a silk thread to your skirt, and that man—whoever he is, Kolchak, or Strelnikov, or any new Tsar they set up—will follow you step by step wherever you go. And you thought I was telling lies! You thought it was: 'Come to me, all ye poor and proletarians of the world.'

"And many other things there are, such as stones raining from heaven, so that a man may go forth out of his house and the stones rain upon him. Or, as some have seen, horsemen riding through the sky, the horse's hoofs hitting the tops of the houses. Or as sorcerers prophesied of old, saying: 'In this woman there is corn, in that one honey, in a third marten fur.' And the knight opened the shoulder of the woman, as if it were a casket, and with his sword took out of her shoulder blade a measure of corn or a squirrel or a honeycomb."

Occasionally we experience a deep and strong feeling. Such a feeling always includes an element of pity. The more we love, the more the object of our love seems to us to be a victim. In the case of some men, compassion for a woman exceeds all measure and transports her to an unreal, entirely imaginary world. Such men are jealous of the very air she breathes, of the laws of nature, of everything that happened in the world before she was born.

Yurii Andreievich was sufficiently well read to suspect that Kubarikha's last words repeated the opening passage of an ancient chronicle, either of Novgorod or Epatievo, but so distorted by copyists and the sorcerers and bards who had transmitted them orally for centuries that its original meaning had been lost. Why, then, had he succumbed so completely to the tyranny of the legend? Why did this gibberish, this absurd talk, impress him as if it were describing real events?

Lara's left shoulder had been cut open. Like a key turning in the lock of a secret safe, the sword unlocked her shoulder blade and the secrets she had kept in the depths of her soul came to light. Unfamiliar towns, streets, rooms, countrysides unrolled like a film, whole reels of film, unfolding, discharging their contents.

How he loved her! How beautiful she was! In exactly the way he had always thought and dreamed and wanted! Yet what was it that made her so lovely? Was it something that could be named and analyzed? No, a thousand times no! She was lovely by virtue of the matchlessly simple and swift line that the Creator had, at a single stroke, drawn all around her, and in this divine form she had been handed over, like a child tightly wrapped in a sheet after its bath, into the keeping of his soul.

And what had happened to him now, where was he? In a Siberian forest with the partisans, who were encircled and whose fate he was to share. What an unbelievable, absurd predicament! Once again everything in his head and before his eyes became confused, blurred. At that moment, instead of snowing as had been expected, it began to drizzle. Like a huge banner stretching across a city street, there hung before him in the air, from one side of the forest glade to the other, a blurred, greatly magnified image of a single, astonishing, idolized head. The apparition wept, and the rain, now more intense, kissed and watered it.

"Go along now," said the witch to Agafia. "I have charmed your cow, she will get well. Pray to the Mother of God, who is the abode of light and the book of the living word."

8

There was fighting on the western border of the taiga. But the taiga was so immense that the battles were like border warfare on the edges of a great kingdom, and the camp hidden in its heart was so full of people that however many went away to fight, there seemed always to be more people left.

The rumble of the distant battle hardly ever reached the camp. Suddenly, several shots rang out in the forest. They followed one another at very close intervals, and all at once turned into a quick, ragged fusillade. People started up and ran quickly to their tents or wagons, and a general commotion began. Everyone got ready for battle.

It proved to be a false alarm. But then a growing crowd streamed toward the place where the shots had been fired.

They stood around a bleeding stump of a man lying on the ground. His right arm and left leg had been chopped off. It was inconceivable how, with his remaining arm and leg, he had crawled to the camp. The chopped-off arm and leg were tied in terrible bleeding chunks onto his back with a small wooden board attached to them; a long inscription on it said, with many words of abuse, that the atrocity was in reprisal for similar atrocities perpetrated by such and such a Red unit—a unit that had no connection with the Forest Brotherhood. It also said that the same treatment would be meted out to all the partisans unless, by a given date, they submitted and gave up their arms to the representatives of General Vitsyn's army corps.

Fainting repeatedly from loss of blood, the dying man told them in a faltering voice of the tortures and atrocities perpetrated by Vitsyn's investigating and punitive squads. His own sentence of death had been allegedly commuted; instead of hanging him, they had cut off his arm and leg in order to send him into the camp and strike terror among the partisans. They had carried him as far as the outposts of the camp, where they had put him down and ordered him to crawl, urging him on by shooting into the air.

He could barely move his lips. To make out his almost unintelligible stammering, the crowd around him bent low. He was saying: "Be on your guard, comrades. He has broken through."

"Patrols have gone out in strength. There's a big battle going on. We'll hold him."

"There's a gap. He wants to surprise you. I know.… I can't go on, men. I am spitting blood. I'll die in a moment."

"Rest a bit. Keep quiet.—Can't you see it's bad for him, you heartless beasts!"

The man started again: "He went to work on me, the devil. He said: You will bathe in your own blood until you tell me who you are. And how was I to tell him, a deserter is just what I am? I was running from him to you."

"You keep saying 'he.' Who was it that got to work on you?"

"Let me just get my breath.… I'll tell you. Hetman, Bekeshin. Colonel, Strese. Vitsyn's men. You don't know out here what it's like. The whole town is groaning. They boil people alive. They cut strips out of them. They take you by the scruff of the neck and push you inside, you don't know where you are, it's pitch black. You grope about—you are in a cage, inside a freight car. There are more than forty people in the cage, all in their underclothes. From time to time they open the door and grab whoever comes first—out he goes. As you grab a chicken to cut its throat. I swear to God. Some they hang, some they shoot, some they question. They beat you to shreds, they put salt on the wounds, they pour boiling water on you. When you vomit or relieve yourself they make you eat it. As for children and women—O God!"

The unfortunate was at his last gasp. He cried out and died without finishing the sentence. Somehow they all knew it at once and took off their caps and crossed themselves.

That night, the news of a far more terrible incident flew around the camp.

Pamphil had been in the crowd surrounding the dying man. He had seen him, heard his words, and read the threatening inscription on the board.

His constant fear for his family in the event of his own death rose to a new climax. In his imagination he saw them handed over to slow torture, watched their faces distorted by pain, and heard their groans and cries for help. In his desperate anguish—to forestall their future sufferings and to end his own—he killed them himself, felling his wife and three children with that same, razor-sharp ax that he had used to carve toys for the two small girls and the boy, who had been his favorite.

The astonishing thing was that he did not kill himself immediately afterward. What could he be thinking of? What could he look forward to? What intentions could he have, what plans? It was a clear case of insanity, and nothing could save him now.

While Liberius, the doctor, and the members of the army soviet debated what to do with him, he roamed freely about the camp, his head hung low over his chest, his dirty-yellow eyes glowering unseeingly. An obtuse vague grimace of inhuman, unconquerable suffering never left his face.

No one was sorry for him. Everyone avoided him. Some people said he should be lynched, but they were not heeded.

There was nothing in the world left for him to do. At dawn he vanished from the camp, fleeing from himself like a dog with rabies.

9

High winter came with its severe frosts. Torn, seemingly disconnected sounds and shapes rose out of the icy mist, stood still, moved, and vanished. The sun was not the sun to which the earth was used, it was a changeling. Its crimson ball hung in the forest and from it, stiffly and slowly as in a dream or in a fairy tale, amber-yellow rays of light as thick as honey spread and, catching in the trees, froze to them in midair.

Invisible feet in felt boots, touching the ground softly with padded soles, yet making the snow screech angrily at each step, moved in all directions, while the hooded and fur-jacketed torsos belonging to them sailed separately through the upper air, like heavenly bodies.

Friends stopped and talked, their faces close together, flushed as at the steam baths, with beards bristling like iced loofahs. Clouds of dense, clammy steam puffed out of their mouths, too large for the clipped, frost-bitten words they accompanied.

Walking along the footpath, the doctor ran into Liberius.

"Hello, stranger! Come to my dugout this evening. Spend the night. We'll have a good talk. There is news."

"Is the courier back? Any news from Varykino?"

"Not a word about your people or mine. This, however, leads me to the comforting conclusion that they must have got away in time, otherwise we would be sure to have heard something. We'll talk about it tonight. I'll expect you."

Going into the dugout that evening, the doctor repeated his question: "What have you heard about our families? Just tell me that."

"You never want to see further than your nose. So far as I know, they are safe and sound. But the point is that the news is first-rate. Have some cold veal."

"No, thanks. Come on now, don't change the subject."

"Are you sure you won't? Well, I'll have a bite. Though bread and vegetables are what we really need. There's a lot of scurvy about. We should have got in more nuts and berries last autumn when the women were there to pick them. Well, as I was saying, our affairs are in excellent shape. What I've always prophesied is coming true. The worst is over. Kolchak's forces are retreating all along the line. It's a complete rout. Now do you see? What did I always tell you? Do you remember how you used to moan?"

"When did I moan?"

"All the time. Especially when we were being pressed by Vitsyn."

The doctor recalled the autumn, the shooting of the rebels, Pamphil's killing of his wife and children, the whole senseless murderous mess to which there seemed to be no end. White and Red atrocities rivalled each other in savagery, outrage breeding outrage. The smell of blood was in his nose and throat, it choked him, it nauseated him, it mounted to his head, it made his eyes swim. That wasn't moaning, that was something entirely different, but how could he explain it to Liberius?

The dugout was lit by torches made of sticks stuck into a metal holder. They gave off an aromatic smell of charcoal. As a stick burned down, the cinder dropped into a bowl of water standing underneath, and Liberius lit a fresh one.

"See what I have to burn"? There's no more oil. And the wood is too dry, it burns too quickly. Sure you won't have some veal? About the scurvy. What are you waiting for to call a staff meeting and give us a lecture on scurvy and the means of dealing with it?"

"Stop tormenting me, for God's sake. What exactly do you know about our people?"

"I've told you. There is nothing certain in the report. But I didn't finish telling you what I've learned from the latest communiqués. The civil war is over. Kolchak's forces are smashed. The main part of the Red Army is in pursuit, it is driving him eastward, along the railway, into the sea. Another part of it is hurrying over this way, and we are joining forces to mop up the considerable scattered numbers of Whites in the rear. The whole of southern Russia is clear of the enemy. Well, why aren't you glad? Isn't that enough for you?"

"I am glad. But where are our families?"

"Not in Varykino, and that's a very lucky thing. Not that there is any confirmation of that crazy business Kamennodvorsky told you about—you remember that rumor last summer about mysterious strangers raiding Varykino? I always thought it was nonsense. But the village is deserted. So it looks as if something did happen after all, and it's a very good thing they got out in time, as they evidently did. That is what the few remaining inhabitants think, according to my source."

"And Yuriatin? What happened there? Who is holding it?"

"That's another absurdity. It can't possibly be true."

"What's that?"

"They say the Whites are still there, but that's a sheer impossibility. I'll prove it to you, you'll see for yourself."

He put another stick in the holder and, getting out a tattered map and folding it so that the district he was talking about was on top, explained the position, pencil in hand.

"Look. All these are sectors where the Whites have been thrown back—here, and here, and here, all over this region. Do you follow?"

"Yes."

"So they can't possibly be anywhere near Yuriatin, because if they were, with their communications cut, they couldn't avoid being captured. Even their commanders must realize this, however incompetent they may be. Why are you putting on your coat? Where are you going?"

"I'll be back in a moment. There's a lot of smoke here, and I've got a headache. I'll just go out for a breath of air."

When he was outside, the doctor swept the snow off the wooden block that served as a seat at the entrance to the dugout and sat down, his elbows on his knees and his head propped on his fists.

The taiga, the camp, his eighteen months among the partisans, went right out of his head. He forgot all about them. Memories of his dear ones filled his mind and crowded out all else. He tried to guess their fate, and images rose before him, each more frightening than the last.

Here is Tonia walking through a field in a blizzard with Sasha in her arms. She keeps wrapping him up in a blanket, her feet sinking into the deep snow. She can barely drag along, using all her strength, but the blizzard knocks her down, she stumbles and falls and gets up, too weak to stand on her feet, the wind buffeting her and the snow covering her up. Oh, but he is forgetting. She has two children with her, and she nurses the little one. Both her hands are busy, like the fugitives at Chilimka who broke down and went mad with grief and strain.

She has both her hands full and there is no one near to help her. Sasha's father has vanished, no one knows where he is. He is away, he has always been away, all his life he has remained apart from them. What kind of father is he? Is it possible for a real father always to be away? And what about her own father? Where is Alexander Alexandrovich? And Niusha? And the others? Better not ask, better not think about it.

The doctor got up and turned to go back into the dugout. Suddenly his thoughts took a different direction and he changed his mind about returning to Liberius.

Long ago he had cached a pair of skis, a bag of biscuits, and other things he would need if a chance to make his escape should ever come. He had buried them in the snow just outside the camp, at the foot of a tall pine. To make doubly sure of finding it he had marked the tree with a notch. Now he turned and walked along the footpath trodden between the snowdrifts in the direction of his buried treasure. It was a clear night with a full moon. He knew where the sentries were posted and at first avoided them successfully. But when he came to the clearing with the mound and rowan tree a sentry hailed him from a distance, took a run on his skis, and standing straight up on them glided swiftly toward him.

"Halt or I shoot! Who are you? Password."

"What's come over you, man? Don't you know me? I'm the camp doctor, Zhivago."

"Sorry, Comrade Zhelvak. I didn't recognize you, no offense meant. All the same, Zhelvak or not, I'm not letting you go any farther. Orders are orders."

"As you wish. The password is 'Red Siberia,' and the reply, 'Down with the Interventionists.' "

"That's better. Go ahead. What are you chasing after at this time of night? Anyone sick?"

"I was thirsty and I couldn't sleep. I thought I'd go out for a breath of air and eat some snow. Then I saw the rowan tree with iced berries on it. I want to go and pick a few."

"If that isn't just like a gentleman's notion! Who's ever heard of picking berries in winter! Three years we've been beating the nonsense out of you others but you're still the same. All right, go and pick your berries, you lunatic. What do I care."

And as swiftly as he had come, the sentry took a run, stood straight up on his long skis, and whistled over the untrodden snow into the distance beyond the bare winter shrubs as thin as thinning hair.

The footpath brought the doctor to the foot of the rowan tree, whose name he had just spoken. It was half in snow, half in frozen leaves and berries, and it held out two white branches toward him. He remembered Lara's strong white arms and seized the branches and pulled them to him. As if in answer, the tree shook snow all over him. He muttered without realizing what he was saying, and completely beside himself: "I'll find you, my beauty, my love, my rowan tree, my own flesh and blood."

It was a clear night with a full moon. He made his way farther into the taiga, to the marked tree, unearthed his things, and left the camp.

THIRTEEN

Opposite the House of Sculptures

 

Merchant Street rambled crookedly downhill, overlooked by the houses and churches of the upper part of Yuriatin.

At the corner there was the dark gray house with sculptures. The huge square stones of the lower part of its facade were covered with freshly posted sheets of government newspapers and proclamations. Small groups of people stood on the sidewalk, reading in silence.

After the recent thaw it was dry and frosty. Now it was light at a time of day when only a few weeks before it had been dark. The winter had just gone, and the emptiness it had left was filled by the light that lingered on into the evenings. The light made one restless, it was like a call from afar that was disturbing, it put one on one's guard.

The Whites had recently left the town, surrendering it to the Reds. The bombardment, bloodshed, and wartime anxieties had ceased. This too was disturbing, and put one on one's guard, like the going of the winter and the lengthening of the spring days.

One of the proclamations pasted on the wall and still readable by the light of the longer day announced:

"Workbooks are obtainable by those qualified at the cost of 50 rubles each, at the Food Office, Yuriatin Soviet, 5 October Street (formerly Governor Street), Room 137.

"Anyone without a workbook, or filling it in incorrectly, or (still worse) fraudulently, will be prosecuted with the utmost rigor of the wartime regulations. Detailed instructions for the correct use of workbooks are printed in I.Y.I.K. No. 86 (1013) for the current year and are posted at the Yuriatin Food Office, Room 137."

Another proclamation stated that the town had ample food supplies. These, it said, were merely being hoarded by the bourgeoisie with the object of disorganizing distribution and creating chaos. It ended with the words:

"Anyone found hoarding food will be shot on the spot."

A third announcement read:

"Those who do not belong to the exploiting class are admitted to membership in Consumer Associations. Details are obtainable at the Food Office, Yuriatin Soviet, 5 October Street (formerly Governor Street), Room 137."

Former members of the military were warned:

"Anyone who fails to surrender his arms or who continues carrying them without having the appropriate new permit will be prosecuted with the utmost severity of the law. New permits are obtainable at the Office of the Yuriatin Revolutionary-Military Committee, 6 October Street, Room 63."

2

The group in front of the building was joined by a wild-looking, emaciated man, black with grime, with a bag flung over his shoulder, and carrying a stick. There was not yet any white in his long, shaggy hair, but his bristly, dark-blond beard was graying. This was Yurii Andreievich. His fur coat must have been taken from him on the road or perhaps he had bartered it for food. His thin, tattered, short-sleeved coat, which did not keep him warm, was the result of an exchange.

All he had left in his bag was the remnant of a crust of bread that someone had given him out of charity, in a village near the town, and a piece of suet. He had reached Yuriatin somewhat earlier, but it had taken him a whole hour to trudge from the outskirts through which the railway ran to this corner of Merchant Street, so great was his weakness and so much had the last few days of the journey exhausted him. He had often stopped, and he had barely restrained an impulse to fall to his knees and kiss the stones of the town, which he had despaired of ever seeing again, and the sight of which filled him with happiness, like the sight of a friend.

For almost half his journey on foot he had followed the railway track. All of it was out of use, neglected and covered with snow. He had passed train after train abandoned by the Whites; they stood idle, stopped by the defeat of Kolchak, by lack of fuel, and by snowdrifts. Immobilized and buried in the snow, they stretched almost uninterruptedly for miles on end. Some of them served as strongholds for armed bands of highwaymen or as hideouts for escaping criminals or political fugitives—the involuntary vagrants of those days—but most of them had become mortuaries and mass graves for the victims of the cold and of the typhus raging all along the line and mowing down whole villages.

That period confirmed the ancient proverb, "Man is a wolf to man." Traveller turned off the road at the sight of traveller, stranger meeting stranger killed for fear of being killed. There were isolated cases of cannibalism. The laws of human civilization were suspended. The jungle law was in force. Man dreamed the prehistoric dreams of the cave dweller.

Every now and then Yurii Andreievich would see lonely shadows stealing along the ditch or scurrying across the road ahead of him. He avoided them carefully whenever he could, but many of them seemed familiar. He imagined that he had seen them all at the partisan camp. In most cases he was mistaken, but once his eyes did not deceive him. The boy who darted out of a snowdrift that concealed a train of wagons-lits, relieved himself, and darted back had indeed been a member of the Forest Brotherhood. It was Terentii Galuzin, who was believed to have been shot dead. In reality he had only been wounded and had lost consciousness. When he came to he had crawled away from the place of execution, hidden in the forest until he recovered from his wounds, and was now making his way home to Krestovozdvizhensk under an assumed name, hiding in the buried trains and running at the sight of human beings.

These scenes and incidents had the strangeness of the transcendental, as if they were snatches torn from lives on other planets that had somehow drifted to the earth. Only nature had remained true to history and appeared in the guise it assumed in modern art.

Now and then there was a quiet, pale gray, dark rose evening, with birches, black and fine as script against the afterglow, and black streams faintly clouded over with gray ice flowing between steep white banks of snow blackened at the edges where the running water had eroded them. Such, in an hour or two, would be the evening in Yuriatin: frosty, gray transparent, and as soft as pussy willows.

The doctor meant to read the notices posted on the house of sculptures, but his eyes kept wandering to the third-floor windows of the house across the street. These were the windows of the rooms in which the furniture left by the previous occupants had been stored. Now, although the frost had filmed them at the edges, it was clear that the glass was transparent; the whitewash had evidently been removed. What did this mean? Had the former occupants returned? Or had Lara moved out and new tenants moved in, rearranging everything?

The uncertainty was unbearable. The doctor crossed the street, went in, and climbed the front staircase he knew so well and which was so dear to him. How often at the camp he had recalled the openwork pattern of the cast-iron steps down to the last scroll. In one place you could look through the lumber room in the basement where broken chairs and old pails and tin tubs had been stacked. They were still there; nothing had changed. The doctor was almost grateful to the staircase for its loyalty to the past.

There had been a doorbell once, but it had broken and stopped ringing even before the doctor had been captured by the partisans. He was about to knock when he noticed that there was now a padlock on the door, hanging from two rings roughly screwed into the old oak panels with their fine carving, which in places had come away. Such destructiveness would have been inconceivable in the old days. There would have been a fitted lock, and if it had been out of order there were locksmiths to repair it. This trifling detail was eloquent of the general deterioration of things, which had gone a great deal further in his absence.

The doctor was sure that Lara and Katenka were not at home. Perhaps they were not even in Yuriatin, and perhaps they were not even alive. He was prepared for the worst. It was only in order not to leave a stone unturned that he decided to look for the key in the hollow between the bricks, where a rat had so greatly frightened Katenka. He kicked at the wall, to make sure of not putting his hand on one now. He had not the slightest hope of finding anything. The hollow was closed by a brick. He removed it and felt inside. Oh, miracle! A key and a note! It was a long note covering a large sheet of paper. He took it to the window on the landing. Another miracle, even more unbelievable! The note was addressed to him! He read it quickly:

"Lord, what happiness! They say you are alive and have turned up. Someone saw you near the town and rushed over to tell me. I take it you'll go straight to Varykino, so I'm going there with Katenka. But just in case, I'm leaving the key in the usual place. Wait for me, don't move. You'll see I am using the front rooms now. The flat is rather empty, I've had to sell some of the furniture. I've left a little food, boiled potatoes mostly. Put the lid back on the saucepan with a weight on it, to keep the rats out. I'm mad with joy."

He read to the bottom of the page, and did not notice that the letter continued on the back. He pressed it to his lips, folded it, and put it into his pocket with the key. Mixed with his immense joy, he felt a sharp, stabbing pain. Since Lara was going to Varykino, and not even bothering to explain, it must be that his family were not there. He felt not only anxious because of this, but unbearably aggrieved and sad about them. Why hadn't she said a single word of how and where they were?—as if they didn't exist at all!

But it was getting darker, and he had still many things to do while it was light. One of the most urgent was to read the texts of the decrees posted in the street. It was no trifling matter in those days to be ignorant of the regulations; it might cost you your life. Without going into the flat or taking off his bag, he went down and crossed the street, to the wall thickly covered with various announcements.

3

There were newspaper articles, texts of speeches at meetings, and decrees. Yurii Andreievich glanced at the headings. "Requisitioning, assessment, and taxation of members of the propertied classes." "Establishment of workers' control." "Factory and plant committees." These were the regulations the new authorities had issued on entering the town in place of those that had been in force. No doubt, Yurii Andreievich thought, they were intended as a reminder of the uncompromising nature of the new regime, in case it had been forgotten under the Whites. But these monotonous, endless repetitions made his head go around. What period did they belong to? That of the first upheaval, or of some later re-establishment of the regime after a White rebellion? Had they been composed last year? The year before? Only once in his life had this uncompromising language and single-mindedness filled him with enthusiasm. Was it possible that he must pay for that rash enthusiasm all his life by never hearing, year after year, anything but these unchanging, shrill, crazy exclamations and demands, which became progressively more impractical, meaningless, and unfulfillable as time went by? Was it possible that because of one moment of overgenerous response he had been enslaved forever?

His eyes lit on a fragment of a speech:

"The reports on the famine disclose the unbelievable inactivity of the local organizations. There are glaring abuses, there is speculation on a gigantic scale, but what are our regional and municipal factory committees doing? Only mass searches in the commercial districts of Yuriatin and Razvilie, only terror applied in all its harshness, down to the shooting of speculators on the spot, can deliver us from famine."

"What an enviable blindness!" thought the doctor. "To be able to talk of bread when it has long since vanished from the face of the earth! Of propertied classes and speculators when they have long since been abolished by earlier decrees! Of peasants and villages that no longer exist! Don't they remember their own plans and measures, which long since turned life upside down? What kind of people are they, to go on raving with this never-cooling, feverish ardor, year in, year out, on nonexistent, long-vanished subjects, and to know nothing, to see nothing around them?"

The doctor's head was spinning. He fainted and fell down unconscious on the sidewalk. When he came to and people helped him to get up and offered to take him where he wished to go, he thanked them and refused, saying he had only to cross the street.

4

He went up again, and this time he unlocked the door of Lara's flat. It was still light on the landing, no darker than before he had gone out. He was glad that the sun was not hurrying him.

The creaking of the door touched off a commotion inside. The uninhabited flat greeted him with the clang and rattle of falling tin pans. Rats, scuttling off the shelves, plopped onto the floor and scattered. They must have bred here by the thousands. The doctor felt sick and helpless to deal with this abomination and decided to barricade himself for the night in one room with a closely fitting door, where he could stop the ratholes with broken glass.

He turned left to the part of the flat that he did not know, crossed a dark passage, and came into a light room with two windows facing the street. Directly opposite the window was the gray building with the statues; groups of people stood with their back to him, reading the announcements.

The light in the room was of the same quality as outside, it was the same new, fresh evening light of early spring. This seemed to make the room a part of the street; the only difference was that Lara's bedroom, where he was standing, was colder than the street.

His sudden weakness earlier that afternoon as he approached the town and walked through it an hour or two ago had made Yurii Andreievich think that he was ill, and had filled him with fears. Now, the sameness of the light in the house and in the street exhilarated him. Bathed in the same chilled air as the passers-by, he felt a kinship with them, an identity with the mood of the town, with life in the world. This dispelled his fears. He no longer thought he would be ill. The transparency of the spring evening, the all-penetrating light were a good omen, a promise of generous fulfillment of distant and far-reaching hopes. All would be well, he would achieve all he wanted in life, he would find and reunite and reconcile them all, he would think everything out and find all the right words. He waited for the joy of seeing Lara as an immediate proof that all the rest would follow.

A wild excitement and an uncontrollable restlessness supplanted his earlier fatigue. In reality this animation was an even surer symptom of approaching illness than his recent weakness. Yurii Andreievich could not sit still. Once again he felt the urge to go out.

He wanted, before he settled down, to have a haircut and get rid of his beard. He had looked for a barber earlier, on his way through town. But some of the barbershops he had known before stood empty, others had changed hands and were used for other purposes, and those still in business were locked. He had no razor of his own. Scissors would have done the job, but though he turned everything upside down on Lara's dressing table, in his haste he did not find any.

Now it occurred to him that there had once been a tailor's workshop in Spassky Street; if it still existed and he got to it before closing time, he might borrow a pair of scissors. He walked out.

5

His memory had not failed him. The workshop was still there, with its entrance from the street and a window running the width of the front. The seamstresses worked in full view of the passers-by. You could see right into the back of the room.

It was packed with sewing women. In addition to the seamstresses there were probably aging local ladies who knew how to sew and had obtained jobs in order to become entitled to the workbooks mentioned in the proclamation on the wall of the gray building.

It was easy to tell them from the professionals. The work shop made nothing but army clothes, padded trousers and jackets and parti-colored fur coats, made of the skins of dogs of different breeds, such as Yurii Andreievich had seen on the partisans. This work, more suitable for furriers, was particularly hard on the amateurs, whose fingers looked all thumbs as they pushed the stiffly folded hems through the sewing machines.

Yurii Andreievich knocked on the window and made signs that he wished to be let in. The women replied by signs that no private orders were accepted. He persisted. The women motioned him to go away and leave them alone, they had urgent work to do. One of them made a puzzled face, held up her hand, palm out, like a little boat, in a gesture of annoyance, and questioned with her eyes what on earth he wanted. He snipped two fingers like scissor blades. This was not understood. They decided it was some impertinence, that he was mimicking them and making fun of them. Standing out there, torn and tattered and behaving so oddly, he looked like a madman. The girls giggled and waved him on. At last he thought of going around the house, through the yard, and knocking on the back door.

6

It was opened by a dark, elderly, stern woman in a dark dress who might have been the head seamstress.

"What a pest you are. Can't you leave us alone? Well, get on with it, what is it you want?"

"I want scissors. Don't be so surprised. I'd like to borrow a pair of scissors to cut my hair and my beard. I could do it here and give them back to you at once, it wouldn't take a minute. I'd be terribly grateful."

The woman looked astonished and mistrustful. She clearly doubted his sanity.

"I've just arrived from a long journey. I wanted to get a haircut but there isn't a single barbershop open. So I thought I'd do it myself, but I haven't any scissors. Would you kindly lend me some?"

"All right. I'll give you a haircut. But I warn you. If you've got something else in mind—any tricks such as changing your appearance to disguise yourself for political reasons—don't blame us if we report you. We are not risking our lives for you."

"For heaven's sake! What an idea!"

She let him in and took him into a side room little bigger than a closet; next moment he was sitting in a chair with a sheet wrapped around him. and tucked under his chin as at the barber's. The seamstress went out of the room and came back with a pair of scissors, a comb, clippers, a strap, and a razor.

"I've done every kind of job in my life," she explained, noticing her client's astonishment. "At one time I was a hairdresser. I learned haircutting and shaving when I was a nurse in the other war. Now we'll snip off that beard and then we'll have a shave."

"Could you cut my hair very short, please?"

"I'll do my best. Why are you pretending to be so ignorant, an educated man like you? As if you didn't know that we now count time by the decade and not by the week, and today is the seventeenth of the month and the barbers have their day off on every date with a seven in it."

"Honestly I didn't know. I've told you, I've just come from a long way off. Why should I pretend anything?"

"Don't fidget or you'll get cut. So you've just arrived. How did you come?"

"On my feet."

"Along the highway?"

"Partly that, partly along the railway track. I don't know how many trains I've seen, all buried in the snow. Luxury trains, special trains, every kind of train you can think of."

"There, just this little bit to snip off and it's finished. Family business?"

"Heavens, no! I worked for a former union of credit co-operatives as their travelling inspector. They sent me on an inspection tour to eastern Siberia and there I got stuck. No chance of a train, as you know. There was nothing for it but to walk. Six weeks, it took me. I can't begin to tell you all I've seen on the way."

"If I were you, I wouldn't begin. I see I'll have to teach you a thing or two. Have a look at yourself first. Here's a mirror. Get your hand out from under the sheet and hold it. All right?"

"I don't think it's quite short enough. Couldn't you take off a bit more?"

"It won't stay tidy if it's any shorter. As I was saying, don't start telling anything at all. It's better to keep your mouth shut. Credit co-operatives, luxury trains, inspection tours—forget all about such things. It isn't the moment for them. You could get into no end of trouble. Better pretend you are a doctor or a schoolteacher. There now—beard cut off, now we'll shave it clean. Just a spot of lather and you'll be ten years younger. I'll go and boil the kettle."

"Whoever can she be?" Yurii Andreievich wondered. He had a feeling he had some connection with her—something he had seen or heard, someone she reminded him of—but he could not think who it was.

She came back with the hot water.

"Now we'll have a shave. As I was telling you, it's much better not to say a word. Speech is of silver, silence is gold. That has always been true. And your special trains and credit co-operatives—better think of something else, say you are a doctor or a teacher. As for seeing sights, keep that to yourself. Whom are you going to impress these days? Am I hurting you?"

"A little."

"It scrapes a bit, I know, it can't be helped. Just a little bit of patience, my dear man. Your skin isn't used to the razor and your beard is very coarse. It won't take a minute. Yes. There's nothing people haven't seen. They've been through everything. We've had our troubles, too. The things that went on under the Whites! Murder, rape, abduction, man hunts. There was one little lordling who took a dislike to an ensign. He sent soldiers to ambush him in a wood outside the town, near Krapulsky's house. They got him and disarmed him and took him under guard to Razvilie. In those days Razvilie was the same as the regional Cheka is nowadays—a place of execution. Why are you jerking your head like that? It scrapes, does it? I know, my dear, I know. It can't be helped. Your hair is just like bristles. There's just this one tough place. Well, the ensign's wife was in hysterics. 'Kolia! Kolia! What will become of my Kolia!' Off she went, straight to the top, to General Galiullin. That's in a manner of speaking, of course. She couldn't get straight to him. You had to pull strings. There was somebody in the next street over there who knew how to reach him, an exceptionally kind person, very sensitive, not like anyone else, always stood up for people. You can't think what went on all over the place, lynchings, atrocities, dramas of jealousy. Just as in Spanish novels."

"That's Lara she's talking about," thought Yurii Andreievich. But he kept prudently silent and did not ask for details. Her absurd remark about the Spanish novels again oddly reminded him of something—precisely by its absurdity and irrelevance—but he still couldn't think what it was.

"Now, of course, it's all quite different. Admittedly there's any amount of investigations, informing, shooting, and so on. But the idea is quite different. To begin with, it's a new government, it's only just come into power, it hasn't got into its stride yet. And then, whatever you say, they are on the side of the common people, that's their strength. In our family we are four sisters, counting myself, all working women. It's natural that we should be drawn to them. One sister died. Her husband was a political exile, worked as manager at one of the local factories. Their son—my nephew, that is—he's at the head of the peasant forces—he's quite a celebrity."

"So that's who she is," Yurii Andreievich realized. "Liberius's aunt, Mikulitsyn's sister-in-law, the one who is a local legend, barber—seamstress—signal woman—Jack of all trades!" But he decided to say nothing so as not to give himself away.

"My nephew was always drawn to the people, ever since his childhood. He grew up among the workers at the factory. Perhaps you've heard of the Varykino factories? Now look at what I've done, fool that I am. Half your chin is smooth and the other half is bristly. That's what comes of talking. Why didn't you stop me? Now the lather's dry and the water is cold. I'll go and warm it up."

When she came back, Yurii Andreievich asked: "Varykino, that's somewhere miles out in the country, isn't it? That should have been safe enough in all these upheavals."

"Well, it wasn't exactly safe. They had it worse than we did in some ways. They had some sort of armed bands out there, nobody quite knows what they were. They didn't speak our language. They went through the place, house by house, shot everyone they found and went off again, without a by-your-leave. The corpses just stayed in the snow. That was in the winter, of course. Do stop jerking your head, I nearly cut you."

"You were saying your brother-in-law lived in Varykino. Was he there when all this happened?"

"No. God is merciful. He and his wife got out in time—that's his second wife. Where they are, nobody knows, but it's certain that they escaped. There were some new people there as well, strangers from Moscow. They left even earlier. The younger of the two men, a doctor, the head of the family, he's missing. That's in a manner of speaking, of course; it was called 'missing' to spare their feelings. Actually he must be dead—sure to have been killed. They kept looking and looking for him, but he never turned up. In the meantime the other one, the older of the two, he was called back home. A professor he was, an agronomist. The government called him back, I was told. They all stopped in Yuriatin on their way to Moscow, just before the Whites came back. Now you're at it again, twisting and jerking. You really make me cut your throat. You get your money's worth out of your barber, my dear man."

So they were in Moscow!

7

"In Moscow! In Moscow!" The words echoed in his heart at every step of the cast-iron stairs, as he climbed them for the third time. The empty flat again met him with the hellish din of scampering, flopping, racing rats. It was clear to Yurii Andreievich that, however tired he was, he would never get to sleep unless he could keep this abomination away from him. The first thing before settling down for the night was to stop the ratholes. Fortunately, there were fewer of them in the bedroom than in the rest of the flat, where the floor boards and skirtings were in a worse state. But he had to hurry. It was getting dark. It was true that a lamp stood on the kitchen table—perhaps in expectation of his coming it had been taken down from its bracket and half filled with kerosene, and a match box with a few matches in it had been left out. But it was better to save both the matches and the kerosene. In the bedroom he found a small oil lamp; the rats had been at the oil but a little was left.

In some places the skirting had come away from the floor. It took him a little over an hour to pack the cracks with broken glass. The door fitted well, and once it was closed the bedroom should be ratproof.

There was a Dutch stove in a corner of the room, with a tiled cornice not quite reaching the ceiling. In the kitchen there was a stack of logs. Yurii Andreievich decided to rob Lara of a couple of armfuls and, getting down on one knee, he gathered them up and balanced them on his left arm. Carrying them into the bedroom, he stacked them near the stove and had a look inside to see how it worked and in what condition it was. He had meant to lock the door but the latch was broken; he wedged it firmly with paper; then he laid the fire at his leisure and lit it.

As he put in more logs, he noticed that the cross section of one of them was marked with the letters "K.D." He recognized them with surprise. In the old Krueger days when timber rejected by the factories was sold for fuel, the boles were stamped before they were cut up into sections to show where they came from. "K.D." stood for Kulabish Division in Varykino.

The discovery upset him. These logs in Lara's house must mean that she was in touch with Samdeviatov and that he provided for her as he had once supplied the doctor and his household with all their needs. He had always found it irksome to accept his help. Now his embarrassment at being in his debt was complicated by other feelings.

It was hardly likely that Samdeviatov helped Lara out of sheer goodness of heart. He thought of Samdeviatov's free and easy ways and of Lara's rashness as a woman. There must surely be something between them.

The dry Kulabish logs crackled merrily and stormed into a blaze, and, as they caught, Yurii Andreievich's blind jealousy turned from the merest suppositions into certainty.

But so tormented was he on every side that one anxiety drove out another. He could not get rid of his suspicions, but his mind leapt from subject to subject, and the thought of his family, flooding it again, submerged for a time his jealous fantasies.

"So you are in Moscow, my dear ones?" It seemed to him now that the seamstress had given him an assurance of their safe arrival. "So you made all that long journey once again, and this time without me. How did you manage on the way? Why was Alexander Alexandrovich called back? Was it to return to his chair at the Academy? How did you find the house? How silly of me! I don't even know whether the house is still standing. Lord, how hard and painful it all is! If only I could stop thinking. I can't think straight. What's the matter with me, Tonia? I think I'm ill. What will become of us? What will become of you, Tonia, Tonia darling, Tonia? And Sashenka? And Alexander Alexandrovich? And myself? Why hast Thou cast me off? O Light everlasting! Why are we always separated, my dear ones? Why are you always being swept away from me? But we'll be together again, we'll be reunited, won't we, darling? I'll find you, even if I have to walk all the way to get to you. We'll see each other, we'll be together, we'll be all right again, won't we?

"Why doesn't the earth swallow me up, why am I such a monster that I keep forgetting that Tonia was to have another child, and that she has surely had it? This isn't the first time I've forgotten it. How did she get through her confinement? To think that they all stopped in Yuriatin on their way to Moscow! It's true that Lara didn't know them, but here is a complete stranger, a seamstress, a hairdresser who has heard all about them, and Lara says nothing about them in her note. How could she be so careless, so indifferent? It's as strange as her saying nothing about knowing Samdeviatov."

Yurii Andreievich now looked around the room with a new discernment. All its furnishings belonged to the unknown tenants who had long been absent and in hiding. There was nothing of Lara's among them, and they could tell him nothing of her tastes. The photographs on the walls were of strangers. However that might be, he suddenly felt uncomfortable under the eyes of all these men and women. The clumsy furniture breathed hostility. He felt alien and unwanted in this bedroom.

What a fool he had been to keep remembering this house and missing it, what a fool to have come into this room not as into an ordinary room but as if into the heart of his longing for Lara! How silly his way of feeling would seem to anyone outside! How different was the way strong, practical, efficient, handsome males, such as Samdeviatov, lived and spoke and acted! And why should Lara be expected to prefer his weakness and the dark, obscure, unrealistic language of his love? Did she need this confusion? Did she herself want to be what she was to him?

And what was she to him, as he had just put it? Oh, that question he could always answer.

A spring evening. The air punctuated with scattered sounds. The voices of children playing in the streets coming from varying distances as if to show that the whole expanse is alive. And this vast expanse is Russia, his incomparable mother; famed far and wide, martyred, stubborn, extravagant, crazy, irresponsible, adored, Russia with her eternally splendid, and disastrous, and unpredictable adventures. Oh, how sweet to be alive! How good to be alive and to love life! Oh, the ever-present longing to thank life, thank existence itself, to thank them as one being to another being.

This was exactly what Lara was. You could not communicate with life and existence, but she was their representative, their expression, in her the inarticulate principle of existence became sensitive and capable of speech.

And all that he had just reproached her with in a moment of doubt was untrue, a thousand times untrue! Everything about her was perfect, flawless.

Tears of admiration and repentance filled his eyes. Opening the stove door, he poked the fire; he pushed the logs that were ablaze and had turned into pure heat to the back and brought forward into the draft those that were less incandescent. Leaving the door open, he sat before the open flames, delighting in the play of light and the warmth on his face and hands. The warmth and light brought him completely to his senses. He missed Lara unbearably and he longed for something that could bring him into touch with her at that very moment.

He drew her crumpled letter from his pocket. It was folded so that the back of the page he had read earlier was outside, and now he saw that there was something written on it. Smoothing it out, he read it by the dancing firelight:

"You surely know what's happened to your family. They are in Moscow. Tonia has had a little girl." After that several lines were crossed out, then: "I've crossed it out because it's silly to write about it. We'll talk our fill when we meet. I'm rushing out, I must get hold of a horse. I don't know what I'll do if I can't. It's so difficult with Katenka.…" The rest of the sentence was smudged and illegible.

"She got the horse from Samdeviatov," Yurii Andreievich reflected calmly. "If she had anything to conceal, she wouldn't have mentioned it."

8

When the stove was hot Yurii Andreievich closed the flue and had something to eat. After that he felt so sleepy that he lay down on the sofa without undressing and at once fell fast asleep. The loud, insolent noise of the rats behind the walls and the door did not reach him. He had two bad dreams, one after the other.

He was in Moscow in a room with a glass door. The door was locked. For greater safety he was keeping hold of it by the handle and pulling it toward himself. From the other side, his little boy, Sashenka, dressed in a sailor suit and cap, was knocking, crying and begging to be let in. Behind the child, splashing him and the door with its spray, there was a waterfall. It was making a tremendous noise. Either the water was pouring from a burst pipe (a usual occurrence in those days) or else the door was a barrier against some wild countryside, a mountain gorge filled with the sound of its raging torrent and the millennial cold and darkness of its caves.

The noise of the tumbling water terrified the boy. It drowned his cries, but Yurii Andreievich could see him trying, over and over again, to form the word "Daddy" with his lips.

Heartbroken, Yurii Andreievich longed with all his being to take the boy in his arms, press him to his chest, and run away with him as fast as his feet would carry him.

Yet, with tears pouring down his face he kept hold of the handle of the locked door, shutting out the child, sacrificing him to a false notion of honor, in the name of his alleged duty to another woman, who was not the child's mother and who might at any moment come into the room from another door.

He woke up drenched in sweat and tears. "I've got a fever, I am sick," he thought. "This isn't typhus. This is some sort of exhaustion that is taking the form of a dangerous illness—an illness with a crisis, it will be just like any serious infection, and the only question is which is going to win, life or death. But I'm too sleepy to think." He dropped off to sleep again.

He dreamed of a dark winter morning in a bustling Moscow street. Judging by the early morning traffic, the trolleys ringing their bells, and the yellow pools of lamplight on the gray snow-covered street, it was before the revolution.

He dreamed of a big apartment with many windows, all on the same side of the house, probably no higher than the third story, with drawn curtains reaching to the floor.

Inside, people were lying about asleep in their clothes like travellers, and the rooms were untidy like a railway car, with half-eaten legs and wings of roast chicken and other remnants of food scattered about on greasy bits of newspaper. The shoes that the many friends, relatives, callers, and homeless people, all sheltering in the apartment, had removed for the night, were standing in pairs on the floor. The hostess, Lara, in a dressing gown tied hastily around her waist, moved swiftly and silently from room to room, hurrying about her chores, and he was following her step by step, muttering clumsy irrelevant explanations and generally making a nuisance of himself. But she no longer had a moment to give him and took no notice of his mutterings except for turning to him now and then with a tranquil, puzzled look or bursting into her inimitable, candid, silvery laughter. This was the only form of intimacy that remained between them. And how distant, cold, and compellingly attractive was this woman to whom he had sacrificed all he had, whom he had preferred to everything, and in comparison with whom everything seemed to him worthless!

9

It was not he but something greater than himself that wept and sobbed in him, and shone in the darkness with bright, phosphorescent words. And with weeping soul, he too wept. He felt pity for himself.

"I am ill," he realized in intervals of clarity between sleep, and delirium, and unconsciousness. "I must have some form of typhus that isn't described in textbooks, that we didn't study at school. I ought to get myself something to eat or I'll die of starvation."

But the moment he tried to raise himself on his elbow he found that he was incapable of moving, and fainted or fell asleep.

"How long have I been lying here?" he wondered during one such interval of clarity. "How many hours? How many days? When I lay down it was early spring. But now the windows are so thick with hoarfrost that the room is dark."

In the kitchen, rats were rattling the plates, scurrying up the walls, and heavily flopping down and squealing in their disgusting contralto voices.

And he again fell asleep, and on awakening discovered that the snowy windows had filled with a pink light, glowing like red wine in crystal glasses. And he wondered whether it was dawn or dusk.

Once he thought he heard voices near him and was terrified, imagining that he was going mad. Crying with self-pity, he complained in a soundless whisper that Heaven had abandoned him. "Why hast Thou cast me off, O Light everlasting, and cast me down into the darkness of hell?"

Suddenly he realized that he was not delirious, that he no longer had his clothes on, that he had been washed and was in a clean shirt, lying not on the sofa but in a freshly made bed, and that sitting beside him, leaning over him, her hair mingling with his and her tears falling with his own, was Lara. He fainted with joy.

10

He had complained that Heaven had cast him off, but now the whole breadth of heaven leaned low over his bed, holding out two strong, white, woman's arms to him. His head swimming with joy, he fell into a bottomless depth of bliss as one who drops unconscious.

All his life he had been active, doing things about the house, looking after patients, thinking, studying, writing. How good it was to stop doing, struggling, thinking, to leave it all for a time to nature, to become her thing, her concern, the work of her merciful, wonderful, beauty-lavishing hands.

His recovery was rapid. Lara fed him, nursed him, surrounded him with her care, and her dazzling loveliness, her questions and answers, whispered in a warm, gentle voice, were always present.

Their subdued conversations, however casual, were as full of meaning as the dialogues of Plato.

Even more than by what they had in common, they were united by what separated them from the rest of the world. They were both equally repelled by what was tragically typical of modern man, his textbook admirations, his shrill enthusiasms, and the deadly dullness conscientiously preached and practiced by countless workers in the field of art and science in order that genius should remain a great rarity.

Their love was great. Most people experience love without becoming aware of the extraordinary nature of this emotion. But to them—and this made them exceptional—the moments when passion visited their doomed human existence like a breath of eternity were moments of revelation, of continually new discoveries about themselves and life.

11

"Of course you must go back to your family. I won't keep you a day more than necessary. But just look at what is going on. As soon as we became part of Soviet Russia we were sucked into its ruin. To keep going, they take everything from us. You have no idea of how much Yuriatin has changed while you were ill. Our supplies are sent to Moscow—for them it's a drop in the ocean, all these shipments simply vanish down a bottomless pit—and in the meantime nothing is left to us. There are no mails, there is no passenger service, all the trains are used for bread. There's a lot of grumbling going on in town, as there was before the Haida uprising, and once again, the Cheka is savagely putting down the slightest sign of discontent.

"How could you travel, weak as you are, nothing but skin and bones? Do you really imagine you could go on foot? You would never get there. When you are stronger, it will be different.

"I won't presume to give you advice, but in your place I would take a job for the time being. Work at your own profession—they'd like that. You might get something in the regional health service.

"You'll have to do something. Your father was a Siberian millionaire who committed suicide, your wife is the daughter of a local landowner and industrialist, you were with the partisans and you ran away. You can't get around it—you left the ranks of the revolutionary army, you're a deserter. Under no circumstances must you remain idle. I am not in a much better position myself. I'll have to do something too. I'm living on a volcano as it is."

"How do you mean? What about Strelnikov?"

"It's precisely because of him. I told you before that he has many enemies. Now that the Red Army is victorious those non-Party soldiers who got too near the top and knew too much are done for. Lucky if they're only thrown out and not killed so as to leave no trace. Pasha is particularly vulnerable; he is in very great danger. You know he was out in the East. I've heard he's run away. He's in hiding. They're hunting for him. But don't let's talk about it. I hate crying, and if I say another word about him I know I'll howl."

"You were very much in love with him? You still are?"

"I married him, he's my husband, Yurochka. He has a wonderful, upright, shining personality. I am very much at fault. It isn't that I ever did him any harm, it wouldn't be true to say that. But he is so outstanding, so big, he has such immense integrity—and I'm no good at all, I'm nothing in comparison. That's where my fault lies. But please let's not talk about it now. I'll tell you more some other time, I promise you I will.

"How lovely your Tonia is. Just like a Botticelli. I was there when she had her baby. We got on terribly well. But let's not talk about that either just at the moment!

"As I was saying, let's both get jobs. We'll go out to work every morning, and at the end of the month we'll collect our salaries in billions of rubles. You know, until quite recently the old Siberian bank notes were still valid. Then they were declared invalid and for a long time, all the time you were ill, we had no currency at all! Just imagine! Well, we managed somehow. Now they say a whole trainload of new bank notes has arrived, at least forty carfuls! They are printed on big sheets in two colors, red and blue, and divided into little squares like postage stamps. The blue squares are worth five million rubles each and the red ones ten. They are badly printed, they fade and the colors are smudged."

"Yes, I've seen that kind of money. It was put into circulation in Moscow just before we left."

12

"Why were you so long in Varykino? Is there anybody there? I thought there wasn't a soul, it was deserted. What kept you so long?"

"I was cleaning your house with Katenka. I thought you'd go there first thing and I didn't want you to see it in the state it was in."

"Why, what kind of state is it in? Is it so bad?"

"It was untidy, dirty, and we put it straight."

"How evasively terse! I feel there's something you are not telling me. But just as you like, I won't try to get it out of you. Tell me about Tonia. What did they call the little girl?"

"Masha, in memory of your mother."

"Tell me all about them."

"Please, not now. I've told you, I still can't talk about it without crying."

"That Samdeviatov who lent you the horse, he's an interesting character, don't you think?"

"Very."

"I know him quite well, you know. He was in and out of the house when we lived there. It was all new to us and he helped us to settle in."

"I know, he told me."

"You must be great friends. Is he trying to help you, too?"

"He positively showers me with kindness! I don't know what I should do without him."

"I can imagine! I suppose you're on informal, comradely terms. Does he run after you much?"

"All the time! Naturally!"

"And you like him? Sorry. I shouldn't have asked you that. I've got no business to question you. That was going too far! I apologize."

"Oh, that's all right! I suppose what you really mean is, what kind of terms are we on? Is there anything more between us than friendship? Of course there isn't! He has done a tremendous amount for me, I am enormously in his debt, but if he gave me my weight in gold, if he gave his life for me, it wouldn't bring me a step nearer to him. I have always disliked men of that kind, I have nothing whatever in common with them. These resourceful, self-confident, masterful characters—in practical things they are invaluable, but in matters of feeling I can think of nothing more horrible than all this impertinent, male complacency! It certainly isn't my idea of life and love! More than that, morally Anfim reminds me of someone else, of someone infinitely more repulsive. It's his fault that I've become what I am."

"I don't understand. What do you think you are? What have you got in mind? Explain to me. You are the best person in the world."

"How can you, Yurochka! I am talking seriously, and you pay me compliments as though we were in a drawing room. What am I like? There's something broken in me, there's something broken in my whole life. I discovered life much too early, I was made to discover it, and I was made to see it from the very worst side—a cheap, distorted version of it—through the eyes of a self-assured, elderly parasite, who took advantage of everything and allowed himself whatever he fancied."

"I think I understand. I thought there was something. But wait a moment. I can imagine your suffering as a child, a suffering much beyond your years, the shock to your inexperience, a very young girl's sense of outrage. But all that is in the past. What I mean is that it isn't for you to make yourself unhappy about it now, it's for people who love you, people like myself. It's I who should be tearing my hair because I wasn't with you to prevent it, if it really makes you unhappy. It's a curious thing. I think I can be really jealous—deadly, passionately jealous—only of my inferiors, people with whom I have nothing in common. A rival whom I look up to arouses entirely different feelings in me. I think if a man whom I understood and liked were in love with the same woman as I am I wouldn't feel a grievance, or want to quarrel with him, I would feel a sort of tragic brotherhood with him. Naturally, I wouldn't dream of sharing the woman I loved. But I would give her up and my suffering would be something different from jealousy—less raw and angry. It would be the same if I came across an artist who was doing the same sort of thing as I do and doing it better. I would probably give up my own efforts, I wouldn't want to duplicate his, and there would be no point in going on if his were better.

"But that wasn't what we were talking about. I don't think I could love you so much if you had nothing to complain of and nothing to regret. I don't like people who have never fallen or stumbled. Their virtue is lifeless and of little value. Life hasn't revealed its beauty to them."

"It's this beauty I'm thinking of. I think that to see it your imagination has to be intact, your vision has to be childlike. That is what I was deprived of. I might have developed my own view of life if I hadn't, right from the beginning, seen it stamped in someone else's vulgar distortion. And that isn't all. It's because of the intrusion into my life, right at the start, of this immoral, selfish nonentity that when later on I married a man who was really big and remarkable, and who loved me and whom I loved, my marriage was destroyed."

"Wait a moment before you tell me about your husband. I am not jealous of him. I told you I can be jealous only of my inferiors, not of my equals. Tell me first about this other man."

"Which man?"

"This wrecker who spoiled our life. Who was he?"

"A fairly well-known Moscow lawyer. A friend of my father's. When Father died and we were very badly off he gave my mother financial help. He was unmarried, rich. I've probably made him sound a lot more interesting than he is by painting him so black. He couldn't be more ordinary. I'll tell you his name if you like."

"You needn't. I know it. I saw him once."

"Really?"

"In a hotel room, when your mother took poison. It was late at night. You and I were both still at school."

"Oh, I remember. You came with someone else. You stood in the shadow, in the hallway. I don't know if I would have remembered by myself, but I think you reminded me of it once, it must have been in Meliuzeievo."

"Komarovsky was there."

"Was he? Quite possible. It wasn't unusual for us to be in the same place. We often saw each other."

"Why are you blushing?"

"At the sound of Komarovsky's name coming from you. I'm no longer used to hearing it, I was taken by surprise."

"There was a school friend of mine who went with me that night, and this is what he told me there in the hotel. He recognized Komarvosky as a man he had happened to see once before. As a child, during a journey, this boy, Misha Gordon, witnessed the suicide of my father—the millionaire industrialist. They were in the same train. Father jumped deliberately from the moving train and was killed. He was accompanied on the journey by Komarovsky, who was his lawyer. He made Father drink, he got his business into a muddle, he brought him to the point of bankruptcy, and he drove him to suicide. It was his fault that my father killed himself and that I was left an orphan."

"It isn't possible! It's extraordinary! Can it really be true? So he was your evil genius, too! It brings us even closer! It must be predestination!"

"He is the man of whom I shall always be incurably, insanely jealous."

"How can you say such a thing? It isn't just that I don't love him—I despise him."

"Can you know yourself as well as that? Human nature, and particularly woman's, is so mysterious and so full of contradictions. Perhaps there is something in your loathing that keeps you in subjection to him more than to any man whom you love of your own free will, without compulsion."

"What a terrible thing to say! And as usual, the way you put it makes me feel that this thing, unnatural as it is, seems to be true. But how horrible if it is!"

"Don't be upset. Don't listen to me. I only meant that I am jealous of a dark, unconscious element, something irrational, unfathomable. I am jealous of your toilet articles, of the drops of sweat on your skin, of the germs in the air you breathe which could get into your blood and poison you. And I am jealous of Komarovsky, as if he were an infectious disease. Someday he will take you away, just as certainly as death will someday separate us. I know this must seem obscure and confused, but I can't say it more clearly. I love you madly, irrationally, infinitely."

13

"Tell me more about your husband—'One writ with me in sour misfortune's book,' as Shakespeare says."

"Where did he say that?"

"In Romeo and Juliet."

"I told you a lot in Meliuzeievo when I was looking for him, and then here, when I heard how his men arrested you and took you to his train. I may have told you—or perhaps I only thought I did—how I once saw him from a distance when he was getting into his car. But you can imagine how many guards there were around him! I found him almost unchanged. The same handsome, honest, resolute face, the most honest face I've ever seen in my life. The same manly, straightforward character, not a shadow of affectation or make-believe. And yet I did notice a difference, and it alarmed me.

"It was as if something abstract had crept into this face and made it colorless. As if a living human face had become an embodiment of a principle, the image of an idea. My heart sank when I noticed it. I realized that this had happened to him because he had handed himself over to a superior force, but a force that is deadening, and pitiless and will not spare him in the end. It seemed to me that he was a marked man and that this was the seal of his doom. But perhaps I'm confused about it. Perhaps I'm influenced by what you said when you described your meeting with him. After all, in addition to what we feel for each other, I am influenced by you in so many ways!"

"Tell me about your life with him before the revolution."

"Very early, when I was still a child, purity became my ideal. He was the embodiment of it. You know we grew up almost in the same house. He, Galiullin, and I. As a little boy he was infatuated with me. He used almost to faint whenever he saw me. I probably shouldn't be talking this way. But it would be worse to pretend I didn't know. It was the kind of all-absorbing childish passion that a child conceals because his pride won't let him show it, but one look at his face is enough to tell you all about it. We saw a lot of each other. He and I were as different as you and I are alike. I chose him then and there in my heart. I decided that as soon as we were old enough I would marry this wonderful boy, and in my own mind I became engaged to him.

"You know it's extraordinary how gifted he is! His father was a signal man, or a crossing guard, I don't know which, and by sheer brains and hard work he reached, I was going to say the level, but it's more like the summit, of present academic knowledge in two fields—classics and mathematics! After all, that's something!"

"But then what spoiled your marriage, if you loved each other so much?"

"Ah, that's hard to answer. I'll try to tell you. But it's strange that I, an ordinary woman, should explain to you, who are so wise, what is happening to human life in general and to life in Russia and why families get broken up, including yours and mine. Ah, it isn't a matter of individuals, of being alike or different in temperament, of loving or not loving! All customs and traditions, all our way of life, everything to do with home and order, has crumbled into dust in the general upheaval and reorganization of society. The whole human way of life has been destroyed and ruined. All that's left is the naked human soul stripped to the last shred, for which nothing has changed because it was always cold and shivering and reaching out to its nearest neighbor, as cold and lonely as itself. You and I are like Adam and Eve, the first two people on earth who at the beginning of the world had nothing to cover themselves with—and now at the end of it we are just as naked and homeless. And you and I are the last remembrance of all that immeasurable greatness which has been created in the world in all the thousands of years between them and us, and it is in memory of all those vanished marvels that we live and love and weep and cling to one another."

14

She was silent for a while, then she went on more calmly:

"I'll tell you. If Strelnikov became Pashenka again, if he stopped his raging and rebelling; if time turned back; if by some miracle, somewhere, I could see the window of our house shining, the lamplight on Pasha's desk and his books, even if it were at the end of the earth—I would crawl to it on my knee's. Everything in me would respond. I could never hold out against the call of the past, of loyalty. There is nothing I wouldn't sacrifice, however precious. Even you. Even our love, so carefree, so spontaneous, so natural. Oh, forgive me! I don't mean that. It isn't true!"

She threw herself into his arms, sobbing. But very soon she controlled herself and, wiping away her tears, said:

"Isn't it the same call of duty that drives you back to Tonia? Oh, God, how miserable we are! What will become of us? What are we to do?"

When she had recovered she went on:

"But I haven't answered your question about what it was that spoiled our happiness. I came to understand it very clearly afterward. I'll tell you. It isn't only our story. It has become the fate of many others."

"Tell me, my love, you who are so wise."

"We were married two years before the war. We were just beginning to make a life for ourselves, we had just set up our home, when the war broke out. I believe now that the war is to blame for everything, for all the misfortunes that followed and that hound our generation to this day. I remember my childhood well. I can still remember a time when we all accepted the peaceful outlook of the last century. It was taken for granted that you listened to reason, that it was right and natural to do what your conscience told you to do. For a man to die by the hand of another was a rare, an exceptional event, something quite out of the ordinary. Murders happened in plays, newspapers, and detective stories, not in everyday life.

"And then there was the jump from this peaceful, naïve moderation to blood and tears, to mass insanity, and to the savagery of daily, hourly, legalized, rewarded slaughter.

"I suppose one must always pay for such things. You must remember better than I do the beginning of disintegration, how everything began to break down all at once—trains and food supplies in towns, and the foundations of the family, and moral standards."

"Go on. I know what you'll say next. How well you see all these things. What a joy to listen to you!"

"It was then that untruth came down on our land of Russia. The main misfortune, the root of all the evil to come, was the loss of confidence in the value of one's own opinion. People imagined that it was out of date to follow their own moral sense, that they must all sing in chorus, and live by other people's notions, notions that were being crammed down everybody's throat. And then there arose the power of the glittering phrase, first the Tsarist, then the revolutionary.

"This social evil became an epidemic. It was catching. And it affected everything, nothing was left untouched by it. Our home, too, became infected. Something went wrong in it. Instead of being natural and spontaneous as we had always been, we began to be idiotically pompous with each other. Something showy, artificial, forced, crept into our conversation—you felt you had to be clever in a certain way about certain world-important themes. How could Pasha, who was so discriminating, so exacting with himself, who distinguished so unerringly between reality and appearance, how could he fail to notice the falsehood that had crept into our lives?

"And at this point he made his fatal, terrible mistake. He mistook the spirit of the times, the social, universal evil, for a private and domestic one. He listened to our clichés, to our unnatural official tone, and he thought it was because he was second-rate, a nonentity, that we talked like this. I suppose you find it incredible that such trivial things could matter so much in our married life. You can't imagine how important this was, what foolish things this childish nonsense made him do.

"Nobody asked him to go to the war, he went because he imagined himself a burden to us, so that we should be free of him. That was the beginning of all his madness. Out of a sort of misdirected, adolescent vanity he took offense at things at which one doesn't take offense. He sulked at the course of events. He quarrelled with history. To this day he is trying to get even with it. That's what makes him so insanely defiant. It's this stupid ambition that's driving him to his death. God, if I could only save him!"

"How immensely pure and strong is your love for him! Go on, go on loving him. I'm not jealous of him. I won't stand in your way."

15

Summer came and went almost unnoticed. The doctor recovered. While planning to go to Moscow he took not one but three temporary jobs. The rapid devaluation of money made it difficult to make ends meet.

Every morning he got up at daybreak, left the house, and walked down Merchant Street, past the "Giant" movie house as far as the former printing shop of the Urals Cossack Army, now renamed the Red Compositor. At the corner of City Street the door of the town hall bore the notice "Complaints." He crossed the square, turned into Buianovka Street, and coming to the hospital went in through the back door to the out-patient department of the Army Hospital, where he worked. This was his main job.

Most of his way from Lara's to the hospital lay in the shadow of spreading trees, past curious little frame houses with steep roofs, decorated doors, and carved and painted patterns around the windows. The house next to the hospital, standing in its own garden, had belonged to Goregliadova, a merchant's wife. It was faced with glazed, diamond-cut tiles, like the ancient boyar houses in Moscow.

Three or four times a week Yurii Andreievich attended the board meetings of the Yuriatin Health Service in Miassky Street.

At the other end of town stood the former Institute of Gynecology, founded by Samdeviatov's father in memory of his wife, who had died in childbirth, now renamed the Rosa Luxemburg Institute, where Yurii Andreievich lectured on general pathology and one or two optional subjects as part of the new, shortened course of medicine and surgery.

Coming home at night, hungry and tired, he found Lara busy at her domestic chores, cooking and washing. In this prosaic, weekday aspect of her being, dishevelled, with her sleeves rolled and her skirts tucked up, she almost frightened him by her regal attractiveness, more breath-taking than if he had found her on the point of going to a ball, taller in high-heeled shoes and in a long, low-cut gown with a sweeping, rustling skirt.

She cooked or washed and used the soapy water to scrub the floors, or more quietly, less flushed, pressed and mended linen for the three of them. Or when the cooking, washing, and cleaning had all been got out of the way, she gave lessons to Katenka; or with her nose in her textbooks worked at her own political re-education, in order to qualify as a teacher at the new, reorganized school.

The closer this woman and her daughter became to him, the less he dared to think of them as family and the stricter was the control imposed on his thoughts by his duty to his own family and the pain of his broken faith. There was nothing offensive to Lara or Katenka in this limitation. On the contrary, this attitude on his part contained a world of deference that excluded every trace of vulgarity.

But the division in him was a sorrow and a torment, and he became accustomed to it only as one gets used to an un-healed and frequently reopened wound.

16

Two or three months went by. One day in October Yurii Andreievich said to Larisa Feodorovna:

"You know, it looks as if I'll be forced to resign from my jobs. It's always the same thing—it happens again and again. At first everything is splendid. 'Come along. We welcome good, honest work, we welcome ideas, especially new ideas. What could please us better? Do your work, struggle, carry on.'

"Then you find in practice that what they mean by ideas is nothing but words—claptrap in praise of the revolution and the regime. I'm sick and tired of it. And it's not the kind of thing I'm good at.

"I suppose they are right, from their point of view. Of course, I'm not on their side. Only I find it hard to reconcile myself to the idea that they are radiant heroes and that I am a mean wretch who sides with tyranny and obscurantism. Have you ever heard of Nikolai Vedeniapin?"

"Well, of course! Both before I met you and from what you've told me yourself. Sima Tuntseva often speaks of him, she's a follower of his. To my shame, I haven't read his books. I don't like purely philosophical works. I think a little philosophy should be added to life and art by way of seasoning, but to make it one's speciality seems to me as strange as eating nothing but horseradish. But I'm sorry, I've distracted you with my nonsense."

"No, actually it's very much what I think myself. Well, about my uncle, I'm supposed to be corrupted by his influence. One of my sins is a belief in intuition. And yet see how ridiculous: they all shout that I'm a marvellous diagnostician, and as a matter of fact it's true that I don't often make mistakes in diagnosing a disease. Well, what is this immediate grasp of a situation as a whole supposed to be if not the intuition they find so detestable?

"Another thing is that I am obsessed by the problem of mimicry, the outward adaptation of an organism to the color of its environment. I think this biological phenomenon can cast light on the problem of the relationship between the inward and the outward world.

"I dared to touch on this problem in my lectures. Immediately there was a chorus: 'Idealism, mysticism, Goethe's Naturphilosophie, neo-Schellingism.'

"It's time I got out. I'll stay on at the hospital until they throw me out, but I'll resign from the Institute and the Health Service. I don't want to worry you, but occasionally I have the feeling that they might arrest me any day."

"God forbid, Yurochka. It hasn't come to that yet, fortunately. But you are right. It won't do any harm to be more careful. I've noticed that whenever this regime comes to power it goes through certain regular stages. In the first stage it's the triumph of reason, of the spirit of criticism, the fight against prejudice and so on.

"Then comes the second stage. The accent is all on the shady activities of the pretended sympathizers, the hangers-on. There is more and more suspicion—informers, intrigues, hatreds. And you are right—we are at the beginning of the second stage.

"We don't have to go far to find evidence of it. The local evolutionary court has had two new members transferred to it from Khodatskoie—two old political convicts from among the workers, Tiverzin and Antipov.

"They both know me perfectly well—in fact, one of them is my father-in-law. And yet it's only since their arrival, quite recently, that I've begun really to tremble for Katenka's and my life. They are capable of anything. Antipov doesn't like me. It would be quite like them to destroy me and even Pasha one of these days in the name of higher revolutionary justice."

The sequel to this conversation took place very soon. A search had been carried out by night at the widow Goregliadova's, at 48 Buianovka Street, next door to the hospital. A cache of arms had been found and a counterrevolutionary organization uncovered. Many people were arrested and the wave of searches and arrests continued. It was whispered that some of the suspects had escaped across the river. "Though what good will it do them?" people said. "There are rivers and rivers. Now the Amur, for instance, at Blagoveshchensk—you jump in and swim across and you are in China! That really is a river. That's quite a different matter."

"The air is full of threats," said Lara. "Our time of safety is over. They are sure to arrest us, you and me. And then what will become of Katenka? I am a mother, I can't let this misfortune happen, I must think of something. I must have a plan. It's driving me out of my mind."

"Let's try to think. Though what is there that we can do? Is it in our power to avert this blow? Isn't it a matter of fate?"

"We certainly can't escape, there's nowhere to go. But we could withdraw into the shadow, into the background. Go to Varykino, for instance. I keep thinking of the house there. It's very lonely and neglected, but we would be less in the way than here, we wouldn't attract so much attention. Winter is coming on. I wouldn't at all mind spending it there. By the time they got around to us we'd have gained a year of life; that's always something. Samdeviatov would be a link between us and the town. Perhaps he'd help us to go into hiding. What do you think? It's true, there isn't a soul, it's empty and desolate, at least it was when I was there in March. And they say there are wolves. It's rather frightening. But then people, anyway people like Tiverzin and Antipov, are more frightening than wolves."

"I don't know what to say. Haven't you been urging me to go to Moscow all this time, telling me not to put it off? That's easier now. I made inquiries at the station. Apparently they've stopped worrying about black-marketeers. Not everyone whose papers aren't in order gets taken off the train. They shoot less, they've got tired.

"It worries me that I've had no reply to my letters to Moscow. I ought to go there and see what's happening to them—you keep telling me so yourself. But then how am I to take what you say about Varykino? You surely wouldn't go to such an out-of-the-way place by yourself?"

"No, of course, without you it would be impossible."

"And yet you tell me to go to Moscow?"

"Yes, you should go."

"Listen. I'll tell you what, I've got a wonderful idea—let's go to Moscow, all three of us."

"To Moscow? You're mad! What should I do in Moscow? No, I have to stay, I must be near here. It's here that Pasha's fate will be decided. I must wait here and be within reach if he needs me."

"Well then, let's think about Katenka."

"I was talking about her with Sima—Sima Tuntseva, she comes to see me sometimes."

"Yes, I know, I've often seen her."

"I'm surprised at you. In your place I'd have fallen in love with her at once. I don't know where you men keep your eyes! She's such a marvel! Pretty, graceful, intelligent, well read, kind, clear-headed."

"Her sister gave me a haircut the day I arrived—Glafira, the seamstress."

"I know. They both live with their oldest sister, Avdotia, the one who's a librarian. They are a good honest working family. I thought of asking them—if it comes to the worst, if you and I are arrested—if they would look after Katenka. I haven't made up my mind yet."

"Only if there really isn't any other way out. Pray God, it won't come to that."

"They say Sima is a bit odd—not quite right in the head. It's true she is not quite normal, but that's only because she's so profound and original. She's not an intellectual, but she's phenomenally educated. You and she are extraordinarily alike in your views. I think I should be quite happy about Katenka if she brought her up."

17

Once again he had been to the station and had again come back without having accomplished anything. Everything was still undecided. He and Lara were faced with the unknown. The weather was cold and dark as before the first snow. The sky, particularly where large patches of it could be seen, as at intersections, had a wintry look.

When Yurii Andreievich came home, he found that Lara had a visitor, Sima. They were having a conversation that was more like a lecture Sima was delivering to her hostess. Yurii Andreievich did not want to be in their way. He also wanted to be alone a little. The women were talking in the next room. The door between the two rooms was open; through the curtain that hung to the floor he could hear all they were saying.

"I'll go on with my sewing but don't take any notice of it, Sima dear. I'm listening. I attended lectures on history and philosophy. Your way of thinking interests me very much. Moreover, it's a great relief to listen to you. We haven't slept much the last few nights, worrying about Katenka. I know it's my duty as her mother to see to it that she is safe if anything happens to us. I ought to think it out calmly and sensibly, but I'm not very good at that. It makes me sad to realize it. I am depressed from exhaustion and sleeplessness. It steadies me to listen to you. And then, it's going to snow any minute. It's lovely when it's snowing to listen to long, intelligent talk. If you glance out of the corner of your eye at the window when it's snowing you always feel as if someone were coming to the door across the yard, have you noticed? Go on, Sima dear. I'm listening."

"Where did we leave off last time?"

Yurii Andreievich did not catch Lara's reply. He listened to what Sima was saying:

"It's possible to use words such as 'culture,' 'epochs.' But people understand them in so many different ways. Because their meaning is ambiguous, I won't use them. I'll replace them with other words.

"I would say that man is made up of two parts, of God and work. Each succeeding stage in the development of the human spirit is marked by the achievement over many generations of an enormously slow and lengthy work. Such a work was Egypt. Greece was another. The theology of the Old Testament prophets was a third. The last in time, not yet superseded by anything else and still being accomplished by all who are inspired, is Christianity.

"To show you the completely new thing it brought into the world in all its freshness—not as you know it and are used to it but more simply, more directly—I should like to go over a few extracts from the liturgy—only a very few, and abridged at that.

"Most liturgical texts bring together the concepts of the Old and the New Testament and put them side by side. For instance, the burning bush, the exodus from Egypt, the youths in the fiery furnace, Jonah and the whale are presented as parallels to the immaculate conception and the resurrection of Christ.

"Such comparisons bring out, very strikingly, I think, the way in which the Old Testament is old and the Gospel is new. In a number of texts Mary's motherhood is compared to the crossing of the Red Sea by the Jews. For instance there is one verse that begins: 'The Red Sea is the likeness of the virgin bride,' and goes on to say that 'as the sea was impenetrable after its crossing by the Israelites, the Immaculate One was incorrupt after the birth of Emmanuel.' That is to say, after the Jews crossed the Red Sea it became impassable, as before, and the Virgin after giving birth to our Lord was as immaculate as before. A parallel is drawn between the two events. What kind of events are they? Both are supernatural, both are recognized as miracles. What, then, was regarded as miraculous in each epoch—the ancient, primitive epoch and the later, post-Roman epoch which was far more advanced?

"In the first miracle you have a popular leader, the patriarch Moses, dividing the waters by a magic gesture, allowing a whole nation—countless numbers, hundreds of thousands of people—to go through, and when the last man is across the sea closes up again and submerges and drowns the pursuing Egyptians. The whole picture is in the spirit of antiquity—the elements obeying the magician, great jostling multitudes like Roman armies on the march, a people and a leader. Everything is visible, audible, overpowering.

"In the second miracle you have a girl—an everyday figure who would have gone unnoticed in the ancient world—quietly, secretly bringing forth a child, bringing forth life, bringing forth the miracle of life, the 'universal life,' as He was afterwards called. The birth of her child is not only a violation of human laws as interpreted by the scribes, since it was out of wedlock; it also contradicts the laws of nature. She gives birth not by virtue of a natural process but by a miracle, by an inspiration. And from now on, the basis of life is to be that inspiration which the Gospel strives to make the foundation of life, contrasting the commonplace with the unique, the weekday with the holiday, and repudiating all compulsion.

"What an enormously significant change! How did it come about that an individual human event, insignificant by ancient standards, was regarded as equal in significance to the migration of a whole people? Why should it have this value in the eyes of heaven?—For it is through the eyes of heaven that it must be judged, it is before the face of heaven and in the sacred light of its own uniqueness that it all takes place.

"Something in the world had changed. Rome was at an end. The reign of numbers was at an end. The duty, imposed by armed force, to live unanimously as a people, as a whole nation, was abolished. Leaders and nations were relegated to the past.

"They were replaced by the doctrine of individuality and freedom. Individual human life became the life story of God, and its contents filled the past expanses of the universe. As it says in a liturgy for the Feast of the Annunciation, Adam tried to be like God and failed, but now God was made man so that Adam should be made God.

"I'll come back to this in a minute," said Sima. "But now I'd like to digress a little. With respect to the care of the workers, the protection of the mother, the struggle against the power of money, our revolutionary era is a wonder, unforgettable era of new, permanent achievements, but as regards its interpretation of life and the philosophy of happiness that is being propagated, it's simply impossible to believe that it is meant to be taken seriously, it's such a comic survival of the past. If all this rhetoric about leaders and peoples had the power to reverse history, it would set us back thousands of years to the Biblical times of shepherd tribes and patriarchs. But fortunately this is impossible.

"Now a few words about Christ and Mary Magdalene—this isn't from the Gospel but from the prayers for one of the days in Holy Week, I think it's Tuesday or Wednesday. You know it all, Larisa Feodorovna, without me; I only want to remind you of something, I am not trying to teach you.

"As you know, the word 'passion' in Slavonic means in the first place suffering, the passion of Christ—'Christ entering upon His passion.' The liturgy also uses it in its later Russian connotation of 'lust' and 'vice,' 'My soul is enslaved by passions, I have become like the beasts of the field,' 'Being cast out of paradise, let us become worthy to be readmitted to it by mastering our passions,' and so on. It may be wrong of me, but I don't like the Lenten texts on the curbing of the senses and the mortification of the flesh. They are curiously flat and clumsy and without the poetry of other spiritual writings. I always think they were composed by fat monks. Not that I care if they themselves broke the rules and deceived other people or if they lived according to their conscience—it's not they that I'm concerned with, but with the actual content of these passages. All these acts of contrition give too much importance to various infirmities of the flesh and to whether it is fat or famished—it's repulsive. It seems to me to raise something dirty, unimportant, inconsequential, to a dignity that does not belong to it. Forgive me for all these digressions.

"I have always wondered why Mary Magdalene is mentioned on the very eve of Easter, just before the death and resurrection of Christ. I don't know the reason for it, but this reminder of what life is seems so timely at the moment of His taking leave of it and shortly before he rises again. Now listen to how the reminder is made—what genuine passion there is in it and what an uncompromising directness.

"There is some doubt as to whether this does refer to the Magdalene or to one of the other Marys, but anyway, she begs our Lord:

" 'Unbind my debt as I unbind my hair.' It means: 'As I loosen my hair, do Thou release me from my guilt.' Could any expression of repentance, of the thirst to be forgiven, be more concrete, more tangible?

"And later on in the liturgy for the same day there is another, more detailed passage, and this time it almost certainly refers to Mary Magdalene.

"Again she repents in a terribly tangible way over her past, saying that every night her flesh burns because of her old, inveterate habits. 'For the night is to me the flaring up of lust, the dark, moonless zeal of sin.' She begs Christ to accept her tears of repentance and be moved by the sincerity of her sighs, so that she may dry His most pure feet with her hair—reminding Him that in the rushing waves of her hair Eve took refuge when she was overcome with fear and shame in paradise. 'Let me kiss Thy most pure feet and water them with my tears and dry them with the hair of my head, which covered Eve and sheltered her in its rushing waves when she was afraid in the cool of the day in paradise.' And immediately after all this about her hair, she exclaims: 'Who can fathom the multitude of my sins or the depths of Thy mercy?' What familiarity, what equality between God and life, God and the individual, God and a woman!"