The Adolescence of Zhenya Luvers

by Boris Pasternak

  “I have decided. We’re going.” Her mother smiled sadly at Zhenya and went out to dress. Seryozha broke his egg with a spoon. Hastily, like a very busy man, be reminded his father that the weather was rough, that there was a snowstorm, he should remember that; then he laughed. Something embarrassing was happening to his thawed-out nose. He wriggled in his chair and pulled a handkerchief out of his school uniform pants. He blew his nose the way his father had taught him—”without hurting your eardrums”—and said, “We saw Negarat’s friend on our way.”

  “Evans?” the father asked absent-mindedly. “We don’t know that man,” Zhenya put in heatedly.

  “Vika!” called a voice from the bedroom. Their father got up and went out.

  At the door Zhenya collided with Ulyasha, who was carrying a lighted lamp. Soon afterward she heard a door closing nearby. That would be Seryozha going to his room. Today he had surpassed himself—his sister liked it when the Akhmedianovs’ friend behaved like a real schoolboy, when it could be said of him that he was wearing a school uniform.

  Doors opened and shut. Rubbers stamped out. Finally, the master and mistress were gone….

  The letter said she had never been touchy, and “if you want something, ask for it, as before,” and when the “dear sister,” laden with greetings and good wishes, had distinguished her from her numerous relatives, Ulyasha, who was called “Juliana” in the letter, thanked the young lady, turned down the lamp, took the letter, the ink bottle and the rest of the greasy paper and went out.

  Zhenya returned to her homework. She kept on dividing the number and put down one dividend after the other. There was no end in sight. The fraction in the quotient rose and rose.

  “Suddenly the measles return,” went through her head. “Today Dikikh said nothing about the infinite.” She felt that she had felt this way earlier today—she’d rather have slept or cried—but she didn’t recall what it was about or when it happened for she couldn’t think clearly any more. The howling outside the window was dying down. The snowstorm was gradually tapering off. Decimal fractions were something quite new to her. There was not enough room on the right. She decided to start again at the beginning, to write smaller, and this time check every term. The street became quiet once again. She was afraid she had forgotten the number she had “borrowed” from the next number and she couldn’t keep the product in her head. “The window won’t run away,” she thought and cast threes and sevens into the bottomless quotient. “I will hear them in time. It’s quiet now. They won’t come in that quickly. They are wearing their furs and Mama is pregnant. I have it now—3773 is repeated. One can either copy it or cross it out.” Suddenly she remembered what Dikikh had told her today: “You needn’t keep them, you can simply leave them out.”

  She got up and went to the window. It had cleared. Separate snowflakes sailed out of the black night. They glided toward the street lamp, swam around it and disappeared, to be replaced by others. The streets glittered, a carpet of snow for a sleigh ride. The carpet was white, radiant and sweet like the gingerbread in the story. Zhenya stood at the window and studied the circles and figures that Andersen’s silver snowflakes formed around the lamp. She stood there for quite a while and then went to Mama’s room to get Murr the Tomcat.

  She entered without light. One could see without it, for the coachhouse roof threw a reflected brilliance into the room. Beneath the high ceiling the beds froze and glittered. The smoke-gray silk lay where it had been carelessly thrown. The small blouses gave out an oppressive odor of armpits and calico. There was a smell of violets, and the cupboard was blue-black like the night outside and like the dry, warm darkness in which this frozen brilliance moved. A brass knob on the bed shimmered like a lonely pearl. Another one was extinguished by a sheet thrown over it. Zhenya squeezed her eyes together; the brass knob separated itself from the bed and swam to the wardrobe. Then she remembered why she had come. With book in hand, she walked to one of the windows. The night was star-bright. Winter had come to Yekaterinburg. She looked down into the yard and thought of Pushkin. She decided to ask her tutor to assign her an essay on Eugene Onegin.

  Seryozha tried to gossip with her. He asked, “Did you put on perfume? Give me some, too.” He had been nice all day, so rosy-checked, but she thought an evening like this might never come again and she wanted to enjoy it alone.

  Zhenya returned to her room and started on the Tales. She read one and started another. She was so absorbed she didn’t hear her brother going to bed in the room next door. A strange game took possession of her face, quite without her knowing it. Her face twisted sideways, like a fish; she pouted her lower lip; and her pupils, glued rigidly to the book as if by a spell, refused to look up, for they were afraid to find it behind the chest of drawers. Then she suddenly nodded to the lines as if she gave them her assent—just as one gives approval to a deed and is pleased about the way things have turned out. She read more slowly when she reached the descriptions of the lakes and threw herself head over heels into the night scenes illuminated with Bengal lights. In one passage, a man who got lost shouted, waited for an answer and heard only the echo of his own voice. She suppressed a cry and had to cough. The un-Russian name “Myra” freed her from her spell. She put the book aside and thought: “So this is winter in Asia. What do the Chinese do on such a dark night?” Her eyes fell on the clock. It must be a terrible feeling to be in this darkness with Chinese. She looked at the clock again and became alarmed. Her parents might come back at any minute. It was nearly twelve. She laced up her shoes and hurried to return the book to its place.

  Zhenya sat up in bed with wide-open eyes. No, it couldn’t be a thief—there were many people. They stamped through the house and talked as loud as in daylight. Suddenly somebody cried out as if he were being murdered, something was dragged along the floor, chairs were overturned. It was a woman’s cry. Slowly Zhenya recognized the voices, every one except that of the woman. An incredible running back and forth began. Doors banged. Then a distant door shut, followed by a stifled cry, as if somebody had stuffed something into the woman’s mouth. But the door opened again, and a searing, scourging whine shuddered through the house. Zhenya’s hair stood on end: the woman was her mother; she had done it. Ulyasha was wailing. She also heard the voice of her father, but only once and not again. She heard Seryozha being pushed into a room, and he roared, “Don’t you dare to lock me up!” Then, just as she was, barefoot, wearing only her nightgown, she dashed into the corridor, almost colliding with her father. He was wearing his overcoat and shouted something to Ulyasha as he ran. “Papa!” She saw that he was running from the bathroom with a jug of water. “Papa!”

  “Where is Lipa?” he shouted in a totally unfamiliar voice. He spilled water on the floor and disappeared through a door. When he came out again a moment later, in his shirt sleeves and without his waistcoat, Zhenya found herself in Ulyasha’s arms and didn’t hear his words, uttered in a desperate, heart-rending whisper.

  “What’s wrong with Mama?”

  Instead of a reply Ulyasha repeated over and over, “No, no. It cannot be. Zhenya dear, go to sleep, cover yourself up, turn over and he on your side. A-ah, God! No, no, dear!” she repeated, covered Zhenya up like a small child and went out. It cannot be, but she didn’t say what could not be, and her face had been wet and her hair disarrayed. Three doors away, a lock clicked behind her.

  Zhenya lit a match to see whether it would soon be dawn. It was only one o’clock. She was astonished. Had she really slept only one hour? The hubbub in her parents’ room continued. A loud groaning rose and fell. Then, for a moment, an endless, eternal silence. Hurried footsteps and muffled voices broke the silence. A bell rang once, then again. Then words, arguments, orders-so many that it sounded as if the rooms were lit by voices, as a table is lighted by a thousand fading candelabra.

  Zhenya fell asleep. She slept with tears in her eyes. She dreamed that there were visitors. She counted them but always miscalculated. Every time there was one perso
n too many. And every time the same horror seized her when she recognized that the extra person wasn’t just anybody: it was Mama.

  One couldn’t help it, one had to feel happy about the small, sunny morning. Seryozha thought of games in the yard, of snowballs, of snowfights with the neighbors’ children. Tea was brought to them in the schoolroom, and they were told that there were floor polishers in the dining room. Their father came in. It was soon clear that he knew nothing about floor polishers. He really knew nothing about them. He told them the true reason for the changes in their routine. Their mother was ill. She needed quiet. Ravens flew, with far-echoing caws, over the street, shrouded in white. A small sleigh glided by, pushing its horse forward. The animal was not yet used to the new harness and kept losing the beat.

  “You’ll go to the Defendovs. I’ve arranged everything. And you, Seryozha—”

  “Why?” Zhenya interrupted.

  But Seryozha had guessed why and forestalled his father. “So that you don’t catch the infection,” he instructed his sister. But the street outside made him restless. He ran to the window as if someone had called to him. The Tartar who came out of the house in his new clothes looked as stately and as highly adorned as a pheasant. He wore a lambskin cap, and his bare sheepskin coat had a sheen warmer than morocco leather. He waddled and rocked slightly, probably because the raspberry-red pattern on his white boots ignored the natural structure of the human foot. These patterns moved arbitrarily; they cared little whether the objects beneath them were feet, teacups or roof tiles. But the most interesting thing of all—at this moment, the weak groaning that came from the bedroom grew louder and their father went into the corridor, forbidding them to follow him—the most interesting thing of all was the tracks he left on the smooth snow with his sharp, narrow boot tips. These tracks, looking as if they had been carved, made the snow appear even whiter and silkier.

  “Here’s a letter. You’ll give it to Mr. Defendov. Personally. Do you understand? Now get dressed. You’ll be taken there immediately. Go to the rear entrance. Seryozha, the Akhmedianovs are expecting you.”

  “Really?” the boy asked rather mockingly.

  “Yes. Get dressed in the kitchen!”

  Their father spoke distractedly and accompanied them slowly to the kitchen, where their furs, caps and mittens were heaped like a small mountain on a stool. The winter air blew in from the stairs. “Ah-yoch!” The frozen call of flying sleighs hung in the air. Since they were in a hurry, they missed their coat sleeves once or twice. Their clothes smelled of closets and sleepy fur.

  “What are you doing? Don’t put it on the edge of the table or it will fall off. Well, how are things?”

  “She’s still groaning.” The chambermaid lifted her apron, leaned down and threw some small logs into the flames of the rumbling kitchen stove. “That’s not my affair,” she said with annoyance and went out of the room.

  In a dented black pail lay yellowed prescriptions and broken glass. The towels were soaked with fresh as well a clotted blood. They seemed to blaze, as if they could be trod out like flaring embers. Only water boiled in the pots. Everywhere stood white crucibles and mortars of unusual shape, as in a drugstore. Little Halim was breaking up ice blocks in the hallway.

  “Is there much left from the summer?” asked Seryozha.

  “We’ll soon have new ice.”

  “Here, give it to me. You’re not doing it right.”

  “What do you mean, not right? I have to break it into little pieces. For the bottles.”

  “Well, are you through?”

  While Zhenya ran once more through the rooms, Seryozha went out onto the steps and beat the icy railings with a stick of wood, waiting for his sister.

  8

  The Defendovs were eating their evening meal. The grandmother crossed herself and sank back into her armchair. The lamp shone dimly and was unsteady. Sometimes it was turned up too high, sometimes too low. Defendov often reached out his hand to the screw; he drew it back slowly, sat back on his seat and his hand shook, not like the hand of an old man, but more as if he were raising a glass of spirits poured too full. His fingertips shook. He spoke in a clear, steady voice, as if he put his words together not with sounds but with individual letters. And he pronounced them all, even the final consonants.

  The swollen neck of the lamp glowed, outlined with geranium and heliotrope tendrils. The cockroaches ran toward the warm glass, and the clock hands advanced cautiously. Time crept as it does in winter. In the room it festered; outside it congealed with a bad smell. Behind the windows, it hurried, doubled and tripled itself in the lights.

  Mrs. Defendov put roast liver on the table. The soup, spiced only with onions, steamed fragrantly. Defendov talked continuously, often repeating the words “I recommend,” but Zhenya heard nothing…. Even yesterday she had felt like crying. Now she thirsted for tears as she sat in the little jacket sewed according to her mother’s instructions.

  Defendov noticed how things were with her. He tried to distract her. Now he spoke to her as to a small child, then he fell into the opposite extreme. His joking questions frightened and confused her. He blindly fingered the soul of his daughter’s friend, as if he were asking her heart its age. After he had detected one of Zhenya’s characteristic traits, he tried to behave in conformity with it and thus help the child to stop thinking about home. But this only reminded her even more that she was among strangers.

  Suddenly she could stand it no longer, got up and murmured with childish embarrassment, “Thank you. I’ve really eaten enough. May I look at the pictures?” Everybody looked startled and she blushed, then nodded toward the adjoining room and added, ” Walter Scott. May I?”

  “Go, go, my dear,” said the grandmother, and with a frown at the others made them keep their peace. “The poor child,” she said to her son when the claret-colored curtain closed behind Zhenya.

  The grim completeness of the set of magazines, The North, lay so heavy upon the bookshelf that it leaned to one side, and the velvety crimson underneath had a golden luster. A pink lamp hung from the ceiling and cast no light on either of the much-rubbed armchairs. The little carpet, buried in darkness, was a surprise to the feet.

  Zhenya had wanted to come into the room, sit down and cry. Tears entered her eyes but her sorrow failed to overflow. How could she shake off this sorrow, which had lain upon her like a beam since yesterday? Tears had no power over it, they could not open the sluice gates. To help them along, she tried to think about her mother.

  Preparing to spend a night with strangers, she realized for the first time the depths of her attachment to this dearest and most beloved human being on earth.

  Suddenly she heard Lisa’s laugh behind the curtain. “Oh, you fidget, oh, you little Lisa devil,” said the grandmother, coughing between her words. Zhenya wondered how she could ever have imagined that she loved this girl; her laughter sounded in the very next room, yet it was distant and useless to Zhenya. And then something turned over within her and let the tears break loose when she thought of her mother, suffering, standing among an endless row of yesterdays, as if among a crowd of people who had come to say good-by on a railway platform and remained behind when the train carried Zhenya away.

  But what was really insupportable was the penetrating look Mrs. Luvers had thrown at her yesterday in the schoolroom. It had buried itself in her memory, and would now never leave her. It was an object that must be accepted, something of value to her that she had forgotten and neglected.

  The wild, delirious bitterness and the utter endlessness of this feeling were so confusing that she felt she might lose her reason over it. Zhenya stood at the window and wept violently. Her tears flowed and she did not wipe them away; her hands moved, yet they grasped nothing. They reached out, clutching spasmodically, desperately and willfully.

  Suddenly a thought came to her—that she was terrifyingly like her mother. She had the feeling with a vividness and certainty which seemed to have the power to turn the thought into
reality and, through the very force of this shockingly swift conviction, make her indeed like her mother. This feeling was so sharp and penetrating that she groaned involuntarily. It was the recognition of a woman who is given the power to contemplate her external loveliness from within. Zhenya couldn’t account for it to herself. It was the first time she had ever experienced anything like it. In only one particular she was not mistaken: Mrs. Luvers had once stood by a window in the same state of excitement, turned away from her daughter and her daughter’s governess; she had bitten her lip and the gloved hand that clutched a pair of opera glasses.

  In a stupor from weeping, but with a happy face, Zhenya went back to the Defendovs. Her walk had changed; now it was broad, dreamy and new. When Defendov saw her walk in, he realized that the picture of her that he had formed in her absence was quite inaccurate. He would have proceeded to draw another one had not the samovar interfered.

  Mrs. Defendov fetched a tray from the kitchen and placed the samovar on the floor. All eyes were turned toward the wheezing copper machine, as if it were alive. Its capricious behavior was tamed when it stood at last on the table. Zhenya sat down on her chair. She decided to enter the conversation, and felt dimly that the choice of a topic was up to her. Otherwise, the others would once more leave her in her perilous solitude and not realize that her mother was present here, through her and in her. This shortsightedness on their part would hurt—and, most of all, it would hurt Mama. She addressed Mrs. Defendov, who with some difficulty was adjusting the samovar at the edge of the table: “Vassa Vassilievna…”

  “Can you have a child?”