The yard was empty. Prokhov had finished his work and gone outside the gate. Out there the melancholy strumming of a soldier’s balalaika now glided closely, very closely, over the grass. Above it danced a thin swarm of mosquitoes. The strumming of the balalaika grew still thinner and fainter. It sank deeper toward the earth than the insects, but it never quite fell into the dust; lighter and airier than the mosquito swarm, it rose, twinkling and dissolving in peaceful harmonies.
Zhenya returned to the house. “Lame,” she thought of the unknown man with the album, “lame but a gentleman without crutches.” She went in by the back door. The yard smelled sweetly and obtrusively of camellias. “Mama has a regular drugstore, a mass of little blue bottles with yellow caps.”
She walked slowly up the stairs. The iron railing was cold. The steps creaked in response to her dragging pace. Suddenly a strange thought entered her mind. She took two steps at a time and stopped on the third. She discovered that there had existed for some time an inexplicable likeness between her mother and the porter’s wife. It was quite inexplicable. She stood still. It is, she thought, like when one says, “We are all people” or “We are all baptized with water” or “Fate makes no difference….” She pushed away a fallen bottle with the tip of her foot, and it fell below on the dusty mat without breaking. She thought, “It is something quite universal, something that all men have in common.” But why, then, was there no likeness between herself and Aksinya? Or between Aksinya and Ulyasha? This seemed all the stranger to Zhenya because two more different persons could hardly be imagined. Aksinya had an earthy quality, like a vegetable garden, which recalled a knobby potato or a swollen gray-green pumpkin, but Mama… Zhenya smiled at the mere thought of the comparison.
But it was Aksinya who gave the tone to this pressing comparison. It was she who had the superiority. The peasant woman lost nothing by it, but the lady lost something. For a second Zhenya had a crazy thought. It seemed to her that something simple and rural had entered into the essence of her mother, and she imagined her saying “ap’l” instead of “apple” and “wo’k” for “work.” Maybe the day will come, she thought, when she wears her new beltless silk morning dress and sails in like a ship and greets us with peasant words. The corridor smelt of medicine. Zhenya went in search of her father.
2
New furniture was bought. Luxury came into the house. The Luvers bought a coach and kept horses. The coachman’s name was Davlecha. Rubber-tired wheels were quite a novelty at the time. When they went for a ride, everything turned and stared after the coach: people, fences, chapels and roosters.
When the coach, out of respect for Mrs. Luvers, started off at a walking speed, she shouted after them: “Don’t go too far, only to the turnpike and back. And look out when you go down the mountain!” The pale sun, which reached her on the doctor’s veranda, glided further along the street, till it reached the nape of Davlecha’s freckled neck and warmed him so that his skin contracted pleasantly.
They drove over the bridge. The conversation of the planks sang out, cunning, full and clear; it was fixed for all time, forever locked in the chasm below and always in her memory, at noon and in her sleep.
Vykormish stamped up the mountain and tried his strength on the steep, unyielding pavement. He stretched and pulled and heaved; he looked like a wriggling locust and, humbled by his unnatural effort, he suddenly became beautiful, like the creature that by its very nature is meant to jump and fly. It seemed as if he couldn’t bear it any longer, his wings flashed angrily, he soared. Really! The horse pulled in, then threw his forelegs high and dashed in a brief gallop through a fallow field. Davlecha shortened the reins and curbed the horse. A thin, shaggy dog barked at them stupidly. The dust was the color of gunpowder. The road turned sharply to the left.
The black road ended at the fence of a railway warehouse. The air felt restless. The sun came slantingly through the bushes and veiled a group of strange small shapes in feminine clothes. The sun bathed them in a white light which appeared suddenly, pouring like liquid lime from a pail overturned by a shoe and ran like a wave over the ground. Bands of sunlight covered the road. The horse moved at a walking pace.
“Turn left,” Zhenya ordered. “There is no road there,” Davlecha replied and pointed out a red fence with his whip. “A dead end.”
“Then stop. I want to look around.”
“There are our Chinese.”
“Yes, I see.” Davlecha noticed that the young lady no longer wanted to converse with him. He sang out a long-drawn “prrrrrr” and the horse, its whole body shaking, stopped as if it had taken root. Davlecha whistled softly and encouragingly to help the horse do what was necessary.
The Chinese ran across the street, giant loaves of rye bread in their hands. They were dressed in blue and looked like women. Their naked heads were crowned by knots on top, which seemed to be twisted in place by handkerchiefs. Some of them hesitated, and one could study them closely. Their faces were dark with dirt, like copper oxidized by poverty. Davlecha took his tobacco pouch from his pocket and began to roll a cigarette. At that moment several women appeared on the corner toward which the Chinese were moving. Probably they also were going to fetch bread. The Chinese who stood in the road guffawed and walked toward the women. They moved back and forth as if their hands were tied together with ropes. Their rocking motions were emphasized by the fact that from neck to ankles they looked poured into gowns cut like those of acrobats. There was nothing frightening about them, and the women did not run away, but stood there laughing.
“Davlecha, what are you doing?”
“The horse pulls; it doesn’t want to stay here.”
Davlecha beat the horse a few times with the reins, then drew them tight and let them out again. “Quiet! You’ll overturn the coach!”
“Why do you beat him?”
“I have to.”
And only when the sly Tartar was in an open field and the slaying horse had quieted down and, swift as an arrow, had removed his young lady from the shameful scene, did Davlecha take the reins into his right hand and put his tobacco pouch, which he had been holding all the while, back under his coat tails.
They returned by another route. Mrs. Luvers saw them coming, probably from the doctor’s window. She came to the threshold at the very moment when the bridge, which had told them its whole tale, resumed it under the water carrier’s cart.
3
The entrance examination at the high school brought Zhenya together with a girl called Lisa Defendov, who had picked rowanberries along the way and brought them with her to school. The daughter of a choir leader had to repeat her French exam. Eugenia Luvers was seated in the empty seat next to her. And so they became acquainted as they sat side by side repeating the same sentence: “Est-ce Pierre qui a volé la pomme? Oui, c’est Pierre qui a volé… etc.”
The fact that Zhenya had been tutored at home proved no handicap to the friendship of the girls. They met often. The visits, however, were one-sided, thanks to certain views held by Zhenya’s mother: Lisa could come to see her friend, but Zhenya was forbidden, for the time being, to go to the Defendovs.
The intervals between their meetings did not keep Zhenya from attaching herself quickly to her friend. She loved Defendova—that is to say, she played a passive role in their relationship. She became Lisa’s “pressure gauge,” watchful and easily upset. All of Lisa’s remarks about her classmates, whom Zhenya did not know, roused in her a feeling of impending rage and bitterness. She was depressed and sad. These were the first attacks of jealousy. Without reason, and solely on the basis of her distrust, Zhenya was convinced that Lisa was playing a game with her, that outwardly she made a show of sincerity but privately laughed about everything that marked her as a Luvers, sneering behind Zhenya’s back at school and at home. But Zhenya found that this was the way it had to be, that it was in the nature of her attachment. Her feeling sprang from the powerful desire of an instinct that knows no selfseeking and can do but one thing: suffe
r for the sake of its idol and burn itself out when it really feels for the first time. Neither Zhenya nor Lisa influenced each other permanently. Zhenya remained Zhenya; Lisa remained Lisa; they met and separated—the one deeply moved, the other completely untouched.
The father of the Akhmedianovs dealt in iron. In the year between the birth of Nazzedin and Smagil he suddenly became rich. Thereafter Smagil was called Samuel and the father decided to give his sons a Russian education. The father overlooked not one peculiarity of the way of life of a “Carin,” a gentleman, and after ten years of eager imitation he had in every respect overshot his goal. The boys did excellently—that is, they adhered strictly to the model their father held up to them, and the brashness of their father’s ambition remained with them, noisy and destructive, so that they were like two circling flywheels left to the mercy of the power of inertia.
In the fourth class the Akhmedianov boys were merely fourth-class pupils. They were made up of broken pieces of chalk, cheating, buckshot, rattling school benches, vulgar swearwords and red-cheeked, snub-nosed selfconfidence. Seryozha befriended them in August. By the end of September the boy no longer had a character of his own. This was in the nature of things. To be a typical high school boy, and the type he later becomes, means to join the camp of the Akhmedianovs. And Seryozha wanted nothing more passionately than to be a typical high school boy. Luvers placed no obstacles in the way of his songs friendships. He noticed no change in the boy, and had he noticed any, he would have ascribed it to adolescence. Besides, he had more serious worries. He had suspected for some time that he suffered from an incurable disease.
4
She was sad, but not for his sake, although everybody agreed how terribly annoying and awkward it must be. Negarat was too wise even for her parents, and all that the parents felt about foreigners transmitted itself indistinctly to the children, as to spoiled pets. Zhenya was sad only because things were no longer the same, because only three Belgians were left, because there was no longer so much laughter.
On the evening Negarat told Mama he had to go to Dijon to do his military service, she was sitting, it so happened, at the table.
“Then, you must be very young,” their mother said and there was sympathy in her voice. He sat with drooping head, and the conversation came to a dead stop. “Tomorrow we put in the winter windows,” Mrs. Luvers went on, and asked Negarat whether she should shut the window. He said it wasn’t necessary, in his country there were no winter windows.
Their father came in soon afterward. He, too, offered expressions of regret when he heard the news. But before he uttered his laments, he asked in astonishment, “Dijon? Then you are not a Belgian?”
“Yes, I am a Belgian, but a French citizen.” And Negarat told the story of the emigration of his “two old folks” in such an interesting way, as if he were not their son, but with as much warmth as if he were reciting from a book about strangers.
“Excuse my interrupting you,” said their mother. “Zhenya, please shut the window. Vika, tomorrow the windows must be sealed. Now please continue. This uncle of yours was a real scoundrel. Did he literally say that under oath?”
“Yes.” And he resumed his story. Then he began talking about his own affairs—the papers he had received yesterday by mail from his consulate. He noticed that Zhenya failed to grasp what it was all about, but was trying hard to understand. Carefully, in order not to wound her pride, he began to explain in detail what military service was all about.
“Yes, yes, I understand. I do understand,” Zhenya repeated gratefully and mechanically. “But why must you go so far away? Can’t you become a soldier here, and drill where everybody else drills?” In her imagination she saw the drill meadows that could be seen from the monastery hill. “Yes, yes, I understand. Oh, yes,” she reassured him.
But the Luvers, who sat by, taking no part in this exchange, felt that the Belgian was simply stuffing the girl’s head with unnecessary detail and threw in lazy, oversimplified comments of their own. Then suddenly the moment came when Zhenya felt sorry for all those who, a long time ago or very recently, had been like Negarat, who had said good-by and taken an unknown route, which had been decreed by fate, in order to become soldiers here at Yekaterinburg, a completely strange place to them. The man had explained everything to her so well. Nobody had made it so clear to her before. The wall of indifference, the crumbling wall of concrete, fell away from before the picture of the white tents; the regiments disappeared and turned into a crowd of real people in soldiers’ uniforms, for whom she felt personally sorry the moment the new meaning given to them brought them to life, stripped them of their exotic glamour, and turned them into fellow creatures.
They said good-by to Negarat. “I am leaving part of my books with Tsvetkov. He is the friend I have told you so much about. Please keep reading them, Madame. Your son knows where I’ve been living; he often visits the landlord’s family. I will pass on my room to Tsvetkov. I will tell him to expect to hear from you.”
“He should come visit us sometime. Tsvetkov, did you say?”
“Yes, Tsvetkov.”
“He should certainly drop in. We’d like to meet him. I knew the family as a child….” And she noticed her husband standing before Negarat, his hands grasping the lapels of his tight-fitting coat and distractedly awaiting the moment when he could make final arrangements for tomorrow with the Belgian. “He should come, but not right away. I will let him know when. Now please take this book—it is yours. I haven’t finished it, but I cried over it, and the doctor advised me to stop reading altogether. To avoid excitement.” And again she glanced at her husband, who stood with his head down, collar crackling, cheeks inflated, as if investigating with great interest whether he really had shoes on both feet and whether they had been properly polished. “Yes, that’s how life is. Please don’t forget your walking stick. I do hope we’ll see each other again.”
“Of course, we shall. Friday. What day is it today?” Negarat became anxious, the way all those who leave become anxious.
“Wednesday. Is it not Wednesday, Vika? Yes, Wednesday.”
“Ecoutez.” Finally their father spoke. “Demain….” and taking Negarat’s arm, they walked downstairs together.
5
They talked as they walked along. Zhenya from time to time had to break into a light trot in order not to be left behind and to keep up with Seryozha. They walked very fast, her coat sliding back and forth, because she had her hands in her pockets and was steering herself with her arms in order to get up more speed. The thin ice broke with a crunch under their rubbers. They were going to buy a gift for Mama to give their departing friend. And they talked as they walked along.
“They took him to the railway station?”
“Yes.”
“But why did he sit in the straw?” “What do you mean?”
“In the cart. Up to his legs.”
“I told you already—because he is a prisoner, a criminal.”
“Are they taking him to jail?”
“No, to Perm. There is no criminal court here. Watch out for your feet.”
They had to cross the intersection, passing the workshop of a coppersmith. The workshop doors had stood open all summer and Zhenya was used to seeing the intersection in a state of friendly commotion, set off by the open jaws of the workshop. All through July, August and September carts stopped here for repairs and blocked the street. Peasants, mostly Tartars, stood around, buckets and pieces of broken, rusty gutter pipe strewn everywhere. The blazing, persecuting sun turned the crowd into a gypsy encampment and painted the Tartars with gypsy colors. It sank into the dust at about the hour when hens were killed behind the neighbors’ fences. The cart frames, freed from their animals, let their shafts with their greased plates drop into the dust.
The same buckets and the same scraps of metal still lay in confused disorder, now powdered with hoar frost. But the doors were tightly shut against the cold, as on a holiday. The intersection was empty, and only the f
amiliar odor of stuffy gas, which flowed with a shrill screech from an air valve, reached Zhenya’s nostrils and clung to them as a cheap fruit wine clings to the palate.
“But is there a prison administration in Perm?”
“Yes, the criminal department…. I think we go this way…. The prison is in Perm because it is the provincial capital. Yekaterinburg is only a district capital—a hole.”
The narrow street led them past houses standing on their own plots of land; it was paved with red bricks and lined with bushes. Streaks of watery sunlight lay on the little street. Seryozha tried to stamp his feet as loudly as possible. “If you tickle this thorn bush in the spring, when it blossoms, its petals will go pop as if they were alive.”
“I know.”
“Are you ticklish?”
“Yes.”
“Then you must be nervous. The Akhmedianovs say that’s so if you’re ticklish.”
They walked on, Zhenya trotting, her coat swinging back and forth, Seryozha with his naturally long stride. They came upon Dikikh when they stopped at a small turnstile at the end of the narrow street. They saw him coming out of a shop half a block away. Dikikh was not alone. He was followed out of the shop by a little man who tried to conceal a limp as he walked. It seemed to Zhenya that she had seen him before. They passed each other without greeting, the other two moving off in a diagonal direction. Dikikh hadn’t noticed the children; he wore high rubbers and kept lifting his hands with fingers outstretched. He seemed not to agree with something his companion was saying and was trying to prove it with his ten fingers. Where had she seen the limping man? A long time ago. But where? Probably in Perm, in her childhood. “Stop!” Something was bothering Seryozha—he dropped to his knees. “Wait!”
The Adolescence of Zhenya Luvers Page 4