“Does it hurt?”
“Yes. These idiots, they can’t even drive a shoe nail properly.”
“Well…”
“Wait, I can’t find it… I know the lame man… Well, thank God!”
“Tom?”
“No, thank God. There’s a hole in the shoe lining, that’s what it is. I can’t help it now. Come on. Wait, I must brush my knees. All right, let’s go.
“I know him. He’s staying with the Akhmedianovs. A friend of Negarat. Remember? I told you about him. He entertains people. They drink all night and there is light in the windows. You remember—when I stayed the night with the Akhmedianovs, on Samuel’s birthday. He is one of those. You remember now?”
She remembered. She realized that she had been mistaken, that she hadn’t seen the lame man for the first time in Perm as she had thought. But she still felt as if she had seen him there. With this feeling nagging her, she explored her memory for everything she could remember from Perm, walking silently behind her brother. She made certain movements, took hold of something, made a turn and found herself in semidarkness among counters, boxes, shelves, servile bowings… and Seryozha was talking.
The bookseller, who also dealt in all kinds of tobacco, didn’t have the book they asked for. But he tried to mollify them by assuring them that the Turgenev they ordered had been sent out from Moscow and was on the way and he had just this minute spoken of it to Mr. Tsvetkov, their tutor. His ingeniousness and his mistake amused the children; they said good-by and left the store empty-handed.
As they were going out, Zhenya asked her brother, “Seryozha, I always forget. Do you know the street you can see from our woodpile?”
“No, I’ve never been there.”
“That’s not so. I’ve seen you there myself.”
“On the woodpile? No, you—”
“No, not on the logs, but in the street behind the Cherep-Savich garden.”
“Oh, you mean that! Yes, that’s right. Behind the garden, way back, beyond the sheds and firewood. Wait a minute. Is that our yard—that yard? Ours? That’s good. When I walk that way I always feel like climbing on the woodpile, and from there onto the storehouse. I’ve seen a ladder there. Is it really our yard?”
“Seryozha, will you show me the way there?”
“What? But if that’s our yard, why should I show it to you? You yourself—”
“Seryozha, you don’t understand again. I mean the street, but you’re talking about the yard. Show me how to get there. Will you show me, Seryozha?”
“I don’t understand you again. We’ll go there right now.
“Really?”
“Yes. And the coppersmith… at the corner?”
“Also the dusty street…”
“Yes, that’s just what you’re asking for. And the Cherep-Savich garden is at the end on the right. Don’t loiter, or we’ll be late for dinner. We’re having crayfish today.”
They spoke of other things. The Akhmedianovs had promised to show him how to solder a samovar. And in answer to her question about what solder was made of, it was a metal, like tin, quite dull. You used it to solder tins and repair kettles and the Akhmedianovs could do all sorts of things like that.
They had to hurry crossing the road or a coach would have held them up. Therefore they forgot, Zhenya her question about the little-used side street and Seryozha his promise to show it to her. They passed the door of the coppersmith’s shop, and when they breathed in the warm, fatty exhalation that is given off during the cleaning of copper handles and candlesticks, Zhenya suddenly remembered where she had seen the lame man and the three others and what they had done. A minute later, she knew that the Tsvetkov of whom the bookseller had spoken was the limping man.
6
Negarat left in the evening. Their father accompanied him to the train. He came back from the station late at night, and his arrival set off a loud, long-lasting hubbub in the porter’s lodge. Somebody came out with lanterns and called somebody else. It was raining buckets, and the geese, whom someone had let out, were cackling frantically.
A growly, shaky morning began. The wet, gray street bounced as if it were made of rubber. The nasty rain splashed mud, the coaches bounced on the paving stones and spit mud at pedestrians in overshoes.
Zhenya was returning home. Reverberations of the night’s row in the yard could still be heard in the morning; she was not allowed to use the coach. She had said she wanted to buy some hemp seed and went to see her friend on foot. But halfway there, she realized that she could not find her way from the business quarter to the Defendovs’ street and turned back. Then it also occurred to her that it was too early, Lisa would still be at school. She was wet to the skin and shivering. The wind grew stronger. But it grew no lighter. A cold, white light fell into the street and lay like leaves on the wet pavement. At the end of the square, behind the threebranched street lamp, dull, huddling clouds hurried in panic toward the town.
The man engaged in moving was either very untidy or impractical. The furniture from his modest workroom was not properly loaded on the cart, but was simply arranged in the same way it had stood in the room, and the castors on the armchairs which peeped from under the white covers glided over the planks as over a dancing floor with every jolt of the cart. The covers shimmered snow-white although they were soaked through. They hit the eye so glaringly that everything else took on their brightness: the paving stones pounded by the water, the shivering pools of water under the fences, the birds flying from the stables, the pieces of lead and even the fig tree in its bucket, which rocked to and fro and bowed clumsily from the cart to all the hurrying passers-by.
The cart was grotesque, and automatically attracted attention. A peasant was walking beside it. The cart listed sharply to one side and moved forward at a walking pace. And over all its groaning plunder hung the wet, leaden word “town”; it brought to life in the girl’s head a number of images as fleeting as the cold October brilliance which flew along the street and fell upon the water.
“He will catch a cold when he unpacks his things,” she thought of the unknown owner. And she imagined a man, any man, as he moved about, staggering and with uneven steps, arranging his belongings in his new lodging. She saw vividly in her imagination his gestures and movements, especially the way he took a rag, limped around the bucket and wiped the hoar frost from the leaves of the fig tree. And she saw him catching the sniffles, the shakes, a fever. He would certainly catch a cold. Zhenya imagined all this vividly. The cart rumbled down the hill, toward the Isset. Zhenya had to turn left.
It probably came from the heavy steps. The tea rose and fell in the glass on the bedside table. The slice of lemon floating in the tea rose and fell. The sun streaks on the carpet rocked to and fro. They swayed like columns, like rows of syrup bottles in shops with signboards showing a Turk smoking a pipe.
Showing a Turk… smoking… a pipe. Smoking… a pipe…
It probably came from the heavy steps. The sick girl went back to sleep.
Zhenya became ill the day after Negarat’s departure, the day she learned on her walk that Aksinya had given birth to a boy, the day she imagined, when she saw the furniture cart, that its owner was threatened with rheumatism. For two weeks she lay in fever, covered with perspiration, sprinkled all over with red pepper which burned her and glued her eyelids and the corners of her mouth together. The perspiration drove her to distraction, and the awareness of shapeless statues mingled with the feeling of being stung. As if the flame that caused her to swell had been poured into her by a summer wasp. As if the sting, a thin gray bristle, had remained stuck in her and she tried to get it out in all possible ways—sometimes from her violet cheekbones, sometimes from the inflamed shoulder that groaned under the nightdress, sometimes from other places.
Then her convalescence started and the feeling of weakness permeated everything. This feeling of weakness abandoned itself, at its own peril, to a strange geometry that was peculiar to it and which produced a slight gidd
iness and nausea.
It started, for example, on the bedspread. The feeling of weakness piled up on the bedspread rows of gradually growing, empty rooms, which in the shivery twilight rapidly began to take the shape of a square which formed the basis of this mad game with space. Or else it loosened band after band from the wallpaper pattern, which made unique patterns before her eyes, as if they were swimming on oil; one pattern took the place of another, their dimensions grew slowly and steadily, like all these hallucinations, and tormented her. Or else the feeling of weakness tortured the girl with a sense of measureless depths which betrayed their bottomlessness instantly with the very first trick they played on the dancing floor. The bed sank quietly into the abyss and the girl sank with it. Her head was like a lump of sugar which is thrown into a yawning, empty chaos, dissolves and disappears.
It came from the heavy steps. The slice of lemon rose and fell. The sun on the wallpaper rose and set….
Finally she woke up. Her mother came in and congratulated her on her recovery. Zhenya had the impression that her mother could read other people’s thoughts. When she woke up, she had heard similar words—the congratulations of her own hands, feet, elbows and knees, which she had accepted, stretching herself out. Their greeting had wakened her. And now Mama, too. It was a strange reunion.
The people in the house came and went, sat down and got up again. They asked questions and received answers. Some things had changed during her illness, others had remained unchanged. The former didn’t touch her, the latter gave her no peace. Her mother had obviously not changed. Neither had her father. But certain things had changed: herself, Seryozha, the distribution of light in the room, the quiet of the other people and some other things.
Had it snowed? Only a little and it melted immediately. There was only a little frost, it was hard to say how things looked, naked, without snow. She hardly noticed whom she asked and what she asked. The answers seemed like a pressure forced on her. The healthy people came and went. Lisa came. There was an argument. Then it occurred to everyone that you can get measles only once and they let her in. Dikikh visited her. She hardly noticed which answers came from whom. When everybody was eating lunch and she was alone with Ulyasha, she remembered how everybody in the kitchen had once laughed over her silly questions. She would be careful now not to ask about such things. She would ask only sensible, relevant questions, in the tone of a grownup. She asked whether Aksinya was pregnant again. The girl rattled the spoon when she took away the glass. “But, my dear child, let her have a rest. She cannot keep on being pregnant, Zhenichka.” She ran out and left the door only half-closed. The whole kitchen rumbled as if the shelves had fallen with all their dishes, and laughter was followed by a loud hooting. It flew toward the cleaning woman, flared up under her hands, clattered and rattled as if a quarrel had passed into blows. Then somebody came and shut the forgotten door.
What is this? Will it thaw again? Then she would have to go by coach again today, for it wasn’t yet possible to go by sleigh. With a chilly nose and hands stiff with cold, Zhenya stood a long time by the window. Dikikh had just left. He had been dissatisfied with her. How can one learn one’s lessons when outside the roosters crow and the sky rumbles and when the rumble ceases, the roosters crow again? Black, dirty clouds like a naked cave. The day thrusts his snout at the windowpane like a calf in a steaming barn. Will spring ever come again? But since lunch a blue-gray frost encircles the air like a hoop, the sky becomes hollow and collapses, the clouds breathe audibly, with a whistling sound, the hurrying hours, flying northward toward the winter darkness, tear the last leaves from the trees, flatten the lawns, break through the chinks, pierce the breast. The mouths of northern storms yawn black behind the house, laden with November. But it is still October.
It is still October. No one can remember such a winter. People say the winter seeds will freeze. They fear a famine. It was as if somebody winked and drew a circle with a magic wand around chimneys, roofs and the starlings’ boxes. There will be fog, snow and hoar frost. But until now, neither the one nor the other. The empty, hollow-cheeked twilight longs for them. It strains the eyes. The early lanterns and the lights in the houses hurt the earth, as one’s head is hurt by a long waiting, when one stares into the distance with dim eyes. Everything waits tensely, the firewood is already piled in the kitchen, for two weeks the clouds have been filled to the brim with snow, the air is pregnant with darkness. But when will the wizard who casts a spell over everything the eye can see and binds it within a magic circle pronounce his incantation and call forth the winter whose breath already steams just outside the door?
How had they neglected it? Really, nobody had bothered about the calendar in the schoolroom. She tore off the leaves. Childish! But still, it was not August 29! “That’s good,” Seryozha would have said. A red-letter day. The decapitation of John the Baptist. The calendar let itself be lifted easily from the nail. She tore off the leaves because she had nothing else to do. She grew bored and soon ceased to be aware of what she was doing, but from time to time she murmured to herself: “The thirtieth. Tomorrow is the thirty-first.”
The words “She hasn’t been outside for three days” reached her from the corridor, snatching her out of her daydreams. She observed how far her aimless work had taken her—all the way to the day of Mary’s Sacrifice. Her mother touched her hand. “Zhenya, I ask you, please tell me…”
She didn’t hear what followed, as if it hadn’t been said. As if in a dream, Zhenya interrupted her mother, and asked her to say, “The decapitation of John the Baptist.”
Her mother repeated these words uncomprehendingly. She didn’t say “Battist.” It was Aksinya who said that.
The next moment Zhenya was wondering about herself. What was it? Who had driven her to it? Where did it come from? Had she, Zhenya, asked this? How could she think that Mama—how fantastic and improbable! Who had invented all this?
Her mother was still standing there, not trusting her ears. She stared at Zhenya with large eyes. This outburst embarrassed her. This request sounded as if Zhenya wanted to make fun of her. But there were tears in her daughter’s eyes .7 Her dark foreboding came true. On the pleasure ride she noticed clearly that the air was growing milder and that the rattling of the hoofs sounded muffled. Even before she had lit the carriage lamps, dry flakes whirled through the air. They weren’t over the bridge before the individual flakes vanished and the snow fell as a thick, closely packed mass. Davlecha climbed down from the driver’s seat and put up the leather hood. For Zhenya and Seryozha it became dark and cavern-like. They would have liked to rage like the wild storm. They only noticed that Davlecha was driving home because they again heard the bridge under Vykormish’s hoofs. The roads could no longer be recognized—they were gone. The night closed in suddenly, the town looked like a crazy thing, moving countless thick, pale lips. Seryozha knelt on the seat, leaned out of the carriage and ordered the coachman to drive to the vocational school. Zhenya was lost in rapture when the secrets and charm of winter came to her with the echo of Seryozha’s words through the muffled air. Davlecha shouted back at him that they had to return home so as not to exhaust the horse; the master and mistress were going to the theater and the horses must be harnessed to the sleigh. This reminded Zhenya that her parents were going out tonight and they would be left alone in the house. She decided to sit cozily by the lamp till late into the night reading Tales of Murr the Tomcat, which were not intended for children. She would sneak the book out of Mama’s bedroom. And chocolate—she would read and eat chocolate, while listening to the howl of the wind through the streets.
The snowstorm was already very intense. The sky shook, and white kingdoms and countries fell—numberless, secret and terrible. Nobody knew where they came from and it was clear that they had never in their lives heard of earth. These blind, midnight countries would cover the earth, without seeing it or knowing it. There was a terrible intoxication about these kingdoms, a devilish fascination. Thinking about them, Zhe
nya swallowed the wrong way and choked for a moment. The swirling air shook everything in its path, and in the far, far distance the fields howled mournfully, as if they were being whipped. Everything was confused. The night threw itself upon the fields, raging through its tangled gray hair, which she cut down and blinded. Everybody out riding shouted that the road could no longer be recognized. Shouts and echoes vanished without meeting and died away, lifted above different roofs by the rampaging wind. The snowstorm.
In the corridor they stamped their feet a long time and shook the snow out of their white, ruffled furs. And how much water flowed from their rubbers onto the checkered linoleum! Eggshells lay on the table, the pepper box had been taken from its stand and not replaced, and pepper lay sprinkled over the tablecloth, the spilled yolks and an opened tin of sardines. Their parents had already eaten their evening meal, but they were still sitting in the dining room and urged the children, who had turned up late, to hurry. They did not scold them, for they themselves had eaten earlier than usual because they were going to the theater. Their mother was uncertain whether she wanted to go or not, and sat there looking depressed. Looking at her, Zhenya realized that she herself was anything but happy.
Finally she opened the silly but rather sad book, and came back into the dining room to ask where the nutcake was. Her father looked at her mother and said nobody was forcing them to go and that they would probably do better to stay home.
“No, of course we’ll go,” said her mother. “I must have diversion, the doctor said so.”
“Well, let’s make a decision.”
“Where is the nutcake?” Zhenya asked for the second time and was told that she ought to eat something else first—one didn’t start with nutcake. However, it was in the cupboard. As if Zhenya were a stranger in the house and didn’t know family habits, added her father. Then he turned to her mother and repeated, “Let’s make a decision.”
The Adolescence of Zhenya Luvers Page 5