Lisa did not answer Zhenya at once. “Quiet, don’t speak so loud. Naturally, all girls can.” She spoke incoherently and in a whisper. Zhenya couldn’t see her friend’s face, for Lisa was looking for matches on the table and not finding any. She knew much more about it than Zhenya; she knew everything, the way children know who have picked it up from the conversation of strangers. Natures whom the Creator loves rebel in such cases. They revolt and are gripped by a wild timidity. They cannot have this experience without certain pathological impulses. The opposite would hardly be considered natural: juvenile insanity bears today the seal of normality.
Somebody had once told Lisa all kinds of vulgar and filthy things in a dark corner. They didn’t shock her when she heard them, and she had carried them about ever since, not forgetting one bit of the dirt that had been revealed to her. She knew it all. Her body was not surprised, her heart made no protest, her soul inflicted no punishment upon her brain because it had dared to find out without consulting her heart about things that didn’t come from the soul.
“I know that.” (“You know nothing,” thought Lisa.) “I know that,” Zhenya repeated. “I’m not asking about that. But whether one feels—you take a step and suddenly you have a child—well…”
“Come on,” said Lisa hoarsely, repressing her laughter. “How can you yell so loud? They’ll hear you!”
The conversation took place in Lisa’s room. Lisa spoke so quietly that one could hear the drip from the washstand. She had found the matches, but hesitated before lighting the lamp, because she couldn’t force a serious expression on her face, which was twisted into a grin. She didn’t want to hurt her friend. She indulged Zhenya’s ignorance because she had no idea that one could talk about these things other than in words that couldn’t be used here in her home, to a friend who didn’t go to school. She lit the lamp. Fortunately the pan had run over and Lisa bent down to wipe up the floor, and so she was able to conceal a new fit of laughter with her apron and the slapping of the cleaning rag. Suddenly she burst into uncontrollable laughter, for she had found a pretext: her comb had fallen into the pan.
During those days Zhenya thought of nothing but her family and waited for the hour when she would be taken home. In the morning, after Lisa had gone to high school, Zhenya dressed and went out alone.
The life of the suburb was not like life in the part of the city where she lived. Most of the day it was empty and boring here. There was nothing to please the eye. Everything one saw was good for nothing, except maybe a birch broom or a stove mop. Black slop water flowed into the street, froze instantly and turned white. At certain hours the street was crowded with very simple people. Workers crawled over the snow like cockroaches. The doors of the tea houses flew open, and waves of soap fumes rolled out, as from a laundry—as if it had turned warmer, as if spring had come, when young men ran bent over through the streets with their trousers tucked into felt boots. The pigeons had no fear of all these people. They flew back and forth above the streets, seeking food. Were any millet, oats or droppings sprinkled over the snow? A pie seller’s stand gleamed in fat and warmth. This glow and warmth entered the mouths that had been scoured with cheap rotgut. The fat burned their gullets. And on the way down, some of it escaped their wheezing lungs. Was it maybe this that warmed the street?
Just as suddenly the street would become empty. Empty peasant sledges drove by, broad flat sledges with bearded men. They were sunk into their furs, which hugged their shoulders like clumsy bears. The sledges left behind sad wisps of hay and the sweet, slow-fading sound of distant sleigh-bells. The merchants disappeared at the turning behind a row of young birches, which from a distance looked like a long picket fence.
Crows came here that had flown croaking over the Luvers’ house. But here they did not croak. They only let out a cry, beat their wings and perched on fences, until suddenly, as if by a sign, they flew to the trees and sat nudging one another on the bare branches. Then one feels, how late it is, how late it is in the whole wide world. So late no watch can tell the time.
Toward the end of the second week, on a Thursday, she saw him again quite early in the morning. Lisa’s bed was empty. When Zhenya woke up, she beard the garden gate click shut behind her. She got up and went to the window without making a light. It was still quite dark. In the sky, in the branches of the trees and in the movements of the dogs there seemed to be the same oppressive heaviness as yesterday. This dismal weather had now lasted three days and there seemed no force that could lift it from the softening snow, as one lifts a cast-iron kettle from a rough shelf. In the window opposite, a lamp was burning. Two bright bands of light fell beneath a horse and struck his shaggy fetlocks. Shadows glided over the snow, and then the sleeves of a ghost crossed his fur-covered arms, cast by the light flickering behind the curtain. The horse stood motionless, dreaming.
Then she saw him. She recognized him immediately from his silhouette in the window. The lame man lifted up the lamp and went out with it. The two bands of light moved behind him, became shorter, then lengthened.
The sleighs flashed into motion and even more suddenly stormed off into the darkness, as if they had gone to the steps in the rear of the house.
Strange that Tsvetkov should find her here in the suburb.
Soon the lamp reappeared and the light slid across the curtains; it began to move back again, until suddenly it came to a halt behind the curtain on the window sill, from which he had taken it.
That was on Thursday. And on Friday they finally came to take her home.
9
On the tenth day after their return, when lessons were resumed after an interruption of over three weeks, Zhenya learned the rest from her tutor.
After lunch, the doctor packed his things and left; she asked him to say hello to the house where he had examined her in the spring, and to all the streets and the Kama. He expressed the hope that they wouldn’t have to call him from Perm again. She accompanied him to the gate, the man who frightened her so much the morning after her return from the Defendovs, when Mama was asleep and she could not see her.
When she had asked the doctor what was wrong with Mama, he had started by reminding her of the night when her parents were at the theater. “After the show, they went out and the stallion—”
“Vykormish?”
“Yes, if that’s his name… Vykormish started to lash out, reared up and trampled a passer-by.”
“Trampled him to death?”
“Yes, unfortunately.”
“And Marna—”
“Your Mama had a nervous shock.” He smiled and tried to explain his Latin phrase, “partus praematurus,” in such a way that she would understand.
“And then my little dead brother was born?”
“Who told you that? Yes.”
“Where? Here? Or was he already dead? No, don’t tell me. Oh, how horrible! Now I understand. He was already dead, or else I would have heard him cry. I was reading into the night. I would have heard him. But when was he alive? Doctor, can such a thing be? I even went into the bedroom. He was dead. Definitely!”
What a piece of luck that she had made her observation at the Defendovs yesterday morning and that the horrible business in front of the theater happened the week before last. What a piece of luck that she recognized him yesterday. She thought confusedly that if she hadn’t seen him, she would have definitely believed, after the doctor’s story, that it was the lame man who had been trampled outside the theater.
And now the doctor was gone, after being their guest for such a long time, almost a member of the family. In the evening, the tutor came. It was washday. In the kitchen the linen was being put through the mangle. The hoar frost melted on the windowpanes, the garden came closer to the window, got tangled in the lace curtains, but reached as far as the table. The rumble of the mangle disturbed the conversation. Dikikh, like everybody else, thought she had changed. She noticed a change in him, too.
“Why are you so sad?”
“Do I look sad? Well, I hav
e lost a friend.”
“So you are sad, too. So many dead people—and all of them so suddenly.” She sighed.
When he wanted to go on with the lesson, something inexplicable happened. Suddenly the girl began to think about how many people were dead, and the reassurance she had gained from the lamp in the room across from the Defendovs began to fade. “Wait! You were once in the tobacconist’s shop, shortly before Negarat left. I saw you with somebody. Was that he?” She was afraid to say “Tsvetkov.”
Dikikh was startled by the inflection in her voice. He recalled the incident and remembered that he had, indeed, been there to buy some papers and to get the collected works of Turgenev for Mrs. Luvers. Yes, that’s right, he had been there with the dead man.
She jerked convulsively and tears sprang into her eyes. But she had not found out the most important thing. When Dikikh then told her, between long pauses punctuated by the creaking of the mangle, what a splendid young fellow he had been, from such a good family, he lit a cigarette. Zhenya realized that only a small hesitation stood between what the teacher was saying and what the doctor had told her. And when he had spoken a few words more, among them the word “theater,” she gave a piercing scream and ran from the room.
Dikikh stood listening. There was no sound in the whole house beyond the rumbling of the mangle. He stood stiff as a stork, his neck stretched and one leg lifted to go to her aid. He went in search for the girl, believing there was no one at home and that she must have fainted. While he collided in the dark with strange objects of wood, wool and metal, Zhenya crouched in a corner and wept. He kept on searching and fumbling about, in his thoughts already lifting her unconscious body from the carpet, and winced when a tear-choked voice cried just beneath his elbow: “I’m here. Look out, there’s a glass cabinet there. Wait for me in the schoolroom.
The curtains and the star-bright winter night outside the window reached to the floor, while at the bottom, buried to the waist in heaps of snow and dragging chains of branches over the snow, the dreaming trees lifted toward the bright light in the window. And somewhere beyond the wall, the mangle rumbled, working on bed sheets. “How can this excessive sensitivity be explained?” the teacher wondered. “Obviously the dead man had a special meaning for the girl. She’s deeply upset.” He had explained periodical fractions to a child; but a grown girl, almost a young woman, had sent him into the schoolroom… and all this in a single month? Obviously, the dead man had made a deep, inexpungible impression upon this young woman. Impressions of this kind have a name. How strange! He had given her lessons every second day and had noticed nothing. She was extremely brave, and he was deeply sorry for her. But when would she cry herself out and come in to him? Everyone was probably out. He felt genuine sympathy for her. It was a night to remember!
He was mistaken. The impression he had in mind had nothing to do with it. But he wasn’t entirely wrong. The impression that was hiding behind all this in Zhenya’s mind was indeed inexpungible. It was deeper even than he believed. The girl couldn’t control this impression because it was important and vital to her; its importance lay in the fact that for the first time another human being had entered her life, the third person, without a name or with only a token name, who aroused neither hatred nor love, but what the Ten Commandments mean when they say: “Thou shalt not kill…. Thou shalt not steal….”
“Thou, individual and living one,” they say, “shalt not do to the unknown and the other what thou dost not wish done unto thyself.
Dikikh was much mistaken when he thought that impressions of this kind have a name. They have none.
Zhenya cried because she believed she was responsible for all this. After all, she had brought him into the family on the day she had seen him in the other people’s garden. And after she had unnecessarily, uselessly and senselessly noticed him, she had met him time and again, always both directly and indirectly, and against all probability, like the last time.
When she saw the book Dikikh took from the shelf she puckered her brow and declared: “No, I won’t answer questions today. Put it back, please. I’m sorry. Please forgive me.”
And without a word, the same hand thrust Lermontov back into the disorderly row of Russian classics.
The End
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The Adolescence of Zhenya Luvers Page 7