Meeting her admirer would lead nowhere.
She would never dare to follow it up.
It was more beautiful this way … An enormous bouquet, too big to hold, a symbol of the brilliant life, full of emotions just as enormous, for which, Alina saw now, she had been born, with that talent of hers, if only she had developed it and not let herself sink from sight in marriage, in the dismal humdrum existence of an officer’s wife. Of her friends at the Borisoglebsk high school, one was the wife of a French diplomat and now lived abroad, another was forever traveling with her very rich husband, and a third, married to a senior civil servant, moved in the best Petersburg society. Alina had always been enthusiastically applauded at school or other local concerts, and had often thought of continuing her musical education at the Conservatoire. But then there was that concert in Tambov, when the thirty-year-old staff captain, after one hearing, had laid siege to her and rushed her into marriage.
Georgi did not much resemble the ideal man whose image Alina had carried in her heart since her school days: there was nothing of Pechorin in him, none of that cruel and lofty contempt for the world and for women which makes the Pechorins irresistible. What he did have was a frank and simple delight in her—and that, of course, was as it should be in a knight. She did not at first recognize in him the husband of her choice. She hesitated. But then she came to believe in him, and would go on believing in him through the years, captivated by his own belief in his destiny: he would go to the Academy, his mind teemed with plans, his comrades jokingly called him “the future Chief of the General Staff.”
She put her faith in him—and surrendered her life to him unconditionally. They married and moved to Petersburg—but by the back door, not to a Petersburg of leisure and ease and social occasions, in which she could cultivate and expand her talents. Sacrifices had to be made for the sake of his future—and sacrifices are a woman’s lot. They lived frugally enough, and still his modest stipend made further economies necessary. But Alina got used to this lifestyle. It became second nature to deny rather than indulge herself. She even came to enjoy it and applied her natural ingenuity to it. Condemned to childlessness after their early disappointment, they treated each other with sensitive affection, showed each other consideration in small things—if Georgi could be said to have eyes for anything except his military duties. He was passionately absorbed in his work, the way he closed his study door meant keep out, don’t distract me. He encouraged her to play the piano more, but what he heard through the wall was not an artistic creation but a featureless flow of background music to his studies. Alina reconciled herself even to this slight. She played to help him think. She came to like their life together, their daily routine, just as it was—confident that she was helping her husband up the steep climb to success.
It didn’t work out that way. Graduating from the Academy with a first-class diploma, and teaching there for a time, led to nothing. His military circle was broken up and his colleagues scattered around backwoods garrisons of soul-destroying dreariness. There were even deadlier holes than Vyatka. Hopes of a brighter future collapsed and were snuffed out. They were gripped by an oppressive feeling that this was the end of everything. It was like drowning in a marsh. And then, of course, Alina sometimes imagined that rough housework had robbed her fingers of their suppleness forever, and that she would never appear on any good platform. But she was willing to endure even this gloomy prospect: she steeled herself for what might be years of stagnation. To have fallen so low was hard for her, but it was no easier for her husband, and his misfortunes grieved her more than him.
Still, before the year was out there was a change for the better. Promotion, this time to Moscow, came his way. But no sooner had they moved and settled in than war broke out.
In wartime, the lot of all soldiers’ wives is the same—or is it? What matters to all of them is “Will he come back alive?” But if we are talking about regular soldiers, something else is just as important: his position in the army. The whole object of a military career is promotion. And Georgi, after his brief elevation to the General Staff, had come to grief and been sent down to his regiment. Even this disaster could have been handled in more ways than one. The natural thing to do was not to reconcile yourself to demotion, to humiliation, but to try to put things right. Alina offered her husband all her emotional support. Alas! It gradually became clear that he was in the grip of some sort of psychological illness. It was not just that he reconciled himself to his fallen state and felt himself that he did not deserve to rise, not just that there were no more soaring hopes, no more crowding plans, but that other feelings, normal human feelings, seemed one by one to shrivel up, even the simple desire to take a month’s leave, to which he was entitled, and to rest. Such sentiments as “the home front, and all I hear about it, is more and more unpleasant to me,” “the home front disgusts me,” surfaced in letter after letter. The grim summer of defeat and withdrawal had ended, and a whole year had gone by, giving Georgi the right to take leave, but he wrote to say definitely that he would not come home, and inviting her to spend a couple of weeks with him in Bukovina, almost at the front, in rented accommodations. It was a bizarre whim, quite impossible to explain to anyone in Moscow, nor indeed could she make sense of it herself. Every officer looked forward to his leave, and indeed looked for any official excuse to get away. But a wife who knows her duty must also know what sacrifices can be asked of her. So although this was not just any month, but that of Alina’s thirtieth birthday, she went—almost into the front line, a shaking experience for a woman. But the whole visit was depressing.
She found her husband in an even worse state than his letters had led her to expect. True, he had never yet been hospitalized, although he had been bandaged up at times. But he was more dispirited, more apathetic than she had ever seen him. For the first few days he spent most of the time recumbent, saying nothing, just sighing heavily, without realizing that he was doing it. Alina felt frightened. She had lost her husband! This was not Georgi! Then, as the days went by, he recovered from his paralysis and started conversing. If that was the word. This was no husband-and-wife conversation. He could talk about nothing except his dead soldiers, Russian losses, the hopeless muddle, and his sickness over it all, and whatever she said in return he either didn’t hear or answered absentmindedly. With his fanatical officer’s code he had never in his life paid much attention to ordinary human stories. He could not have explained his present state very well himself, but Alina studied him with a woman’s eye more closely than ever before and reached a conclusion. It was not their separation that had made strangers of them, it was Georgi’s reaction to the war. He had let his spirit get weighed down with chunks of iron and was drowning with them. He had dedicated his whole life to war—and found that he could not bear it. The war with Japan he had borne very well, but not this one. His strength had unexpectedly failed him. His fire had gone out. Horrified, she watched him slowly sinking, and was powerless to help. He saw himself how low he had fallen, and had no wish to pick himself up. Worse, he was dragging her down with him into the morass of hopelessness. To drown together? No! She must save him, distract him, amuse him, enliven him with refreshing comments on Moscow life. This would have been easily done at home, in Moscow: a whole month there and he would have been himself again. But he had refused to come. As it was, their only diversion was dreary walks through small-town streets up into the foothills. So Alina’s visit to her husband, which should have been a holiday, brought her grief instead. He had no thought for her. It was Vyatka all over again—the same degrading backwoods existence. And Georgi had changed so much in the last few years that it was as if they were having to get to know each other all over again, disagreeing and even quarreling at times. The visit ended, and he was still very far from being his former self. And it was clear now that the great future to which she had so joyfully looked forward with him was not to be. He had not just suffered a career setback at GHQ, he had proved unequal to his task. His
dreams and his plans had come to nothing. His protests had failed. She was desperately sorry for him.
For him—and for herself. He was still part of her life—yet it was as though he was lost to her.
He, on the other hand, was not sensitive enough to enter into his wife’s feelings, to realize what he was doing to her, what it was like for her. Many months later, going over their whole ten years together, Alina found an explanation. Before his military interests had outweighed all else, absorbed him completely, he could be tender and affectionate, though he was entirely wrapped up in his own concerns. Now that this premature aging of the emotions, this atrophy of all vital impulses had come upon him, the little island reserved for his personal life had suffered most of all. Lying beside his wife, he had thawed out a little, but seemed to have had no deep-felt need for her to be there. To be united with him, Alina had sacrificed what might perhaps have been a brilliant life, she had never failed in her duty, she had found ways of brightening their cramped existence, had even endured the backwoods of Vyatka, but it never occurred to him to show that he appreciated how much she had sacrificed. It was not his fault. He was just not very sensitive.
Their parting was miserable. Those two weeks had not brought them closer—on the contrary. They had less in common than ever before. Alina vowed never to spend his leave with him in that way again. Let Georgi come to Moscow.
It was lucky that they had set up house in Moscow before the war. Moscow had liberated Alina, given her scope to exercise her powers, helped her to try her own wings and find them stronger than she had realized in the previous Cinderella role. She had been her husband’s prisoner for eight years, forgetful of her own unrealized possibilities. They could not be hidden forever. A sensitive and complex personality always has ungratified interests. The war brought an upsurge of public eagerness to help Russian eagles to victory, and in it Alina had found her own airstream. Not immediately. She had begun, like everybody else, by rolling bandages and counting soldiers’ underwear. But then they had the idea of organizing “patriotic concerts,” to raise money for the wounded and disabled, help the families of enlisted men, and send parcels to the defenders of their native land. Alina had known hardly anyone in her first years in Moscow, but now she made new acquaintances quickly. Till then her husband had monopolized the right to be energetic, and she had rarely applied the word to herself. But now it was Alina’s energy that became a byword among the other women active in the same cause. Her enterprise, her tirelessness, her eloquent appeals to those who had power in the Union of Towns made her a conspicuous figure. She got through to Chelnokov on two occasions. She succeeded in obtaining certain essential permits from the Military District Command, and won the astonished gratitude of hospital boards. She and her husband had lived in Petersburg for six years, but only now in Moscow, in the midst of all this brisk and rewarding activity, did she feel a metropolitan buoyancy. She was one of the first to succeed in getting permission to form volunteer groups to give “flying concerts” for the army in the field. Wherever she went her piano playing won grateful applause from an audience innocent of Conservatoire snobbery, and Alina flourished in this bracing atmosphere. It was shown, and proved beyond doubt, that she was a person in her own right, not just an appendage to her husband. (Georgi, saying goodbye in Bukovina, had told her to live her life to the full, and give all the concerts she could.)
There were about a dozen people in her concert party. There was a fat-faced funny man who did comic Ukrainian songs. A mustachioed quartermaster lieutenant colonel who sang baritone. A violinist of Mephistophelian appearance. A young lawyer’s clerk who performed monologues. Two ladies who sang and one who danced. (All of these were regularly accompanied by the fair-headed fellow with the strong jaw who used to play the piano at the Union cinema.) And every member of the group had his or her own circle of friends, which further broadened Alina’s Moscow acquaintance.
She became especially friendly with Susanna Iosifovna Korzner, the most amiable thirty-five-year-old wife of a well-known Moscow lawyer. Susanna performed monologues and recited verse, and Alina volunteered to accompany her recital to the music of “$CLakya Muni,” “The White Veil,” and other pieces. This necessitated joint rehearsals at home, and in the case of Sholem Aleichem’s stories, and excerpts from “The Gadfly,” consultation with the authorities to make sure that they fitted into the approved framework of patriotic concerts. Alina readily undertook these démarches, and carried them out successfully. This brought her and Susanna Iosifovna still closer together, and they began calling on each other. Susanna had no pretentions, did not care whether she was applauded, didn’t envy the success of other performers, and was not too proud to sit down and turn the pages for Alina.
“You wouldn’t think it took much learning, would you?” Alina said laughingly. “But I never could teach my husband to follow the music well enough to turn the pages. There are some primitive souls who just won’t respond to the arts. I could be playing away in the next room, and if I asked him afterward what I’d just played, he would never know the answer, not if I played the same thing twenty times over! A man of wood …”
Susanna Iosifovna was always such a marvelous listener—to music, with her shoulders tensed as she listened, or, with her olive green and red-brown eyes open wide, absorbing anything you told her, however ordinary—that Alina slipped more and more easily into the habit of confiding in her: it was no good locking everything up inside herself and brooding silently.
“Heavens above, Susanna Iosifovna, I’ve made so many sacrifices for him, conscientiously humbled myself for so many years, to help him in life’s battle. But I could always believe then that I would be rewarded someday and we would start living like other people! But no—he’s throwing his own life, and mine with it, into some gaping black hole. Imagine him refusing to come home on leave! I ask you, what normal officer would ever do that?
“But that’s not the worst of it. He was always inclined to be a dry stick, but during the war he’s grown cold and apathetic, given up completely—and he’s only forty! His life is a failure. Even when the war ends he’ll never be his old self again.”
She told the story of their marriage—how she had refused him at first, and how he had captured her by his passionate admiration of her. He had expressed his feelings so vividly, especially in letters, and she showed Susanna Georgi’s old letters and her old album from her girlhood in Borisoglebsk, and Susanna bore witness to the presentation of the unforgettable bouquet. The album so often pored over in solitude, of course, meant little to an outsider—every entry was more than just that, it was a whole remembered event, a meeting of soul with soul, a moment of enchantment, a speaking look, none of which paper could preserve, and in any case what was written down was always less than what was felt. That whimsical “To Diana,” for instance, was more than an epigram, it faithfully caught something of the original, her profile, her arm, and so something of her character. Ah, how different Alina’s life might have been.
The friends shared their efforts to economize, in the manner newly fashionable among women in the capital: altering old frocks instead of buying new ones, not visiting restaurants, dismissing superfluous servants (Alina, though, had only a part-time maid, whereas Susanna had a cook and a chambermaid too, not to mention her husband’s chauffeur in the daytime). Moscow had always been more sober than Petersburg where dress was concerned, and was now more austere than ever. Ostentation in dress had become indecent. Even Shchukin’s daughter went to the theater, drawn by those fabulous horses caparisoned with blue netting (there was, however, a move to do without horses), modestly dressed and without diamonds. The expensively dressed refugees from Warsaw and the nouveaux riches were the only eyesores. They cared for nothing and no one, but this was a stratum which did not belong to the enlightened middle class, and the sources of their wealth were dubious. For someone of restricted means like Alina, it was all the more imperative to show restraint in her dress, even on the concert pla
tform, and more often than not to deny herself even a new hat, like the fashionable broad-brimmed sort with the slanting feather that seemed to carry you along like a wing.
People gave up lavish receptions, but lively dinner parties went on—where else could you talk? Alina was flattered to be invited to the Korzners’ for the evening. There were always ten, or sometimes twenty, dining, all of them quite prominent people, mostly from legal circles: Levashkevich, who was Korzner’s associate as legal adviser to the Azov-Don Bank, Krestovnikov … The famous Gruzenberg sometimes looked in, as did Mandelstam, the leader of the “left-wing Kadets,” and the brilliant Tyrkova—member of the Kadets’ Central Committee, and Duma correspondent—occasionally put in a brief appearance. On one occasion the illustrious Maklakov turned up. Alina was not present, and much regretted missing him.
The Korzners rented an eleven-room apartment on Ilinka Street, in the business quarter. Besides Korzner’s office there was a reception room for his personal assistant, a general reception room, a drawing room, a bedroom paneled with light maple, a big dining room paneled with dark oak, furnished in the modern style, with a massive table to seat twelve, or, opened out, twenty-four, a snack cart to wheel around, and a table for the samovar at the far end of the room: often, one samovar was not enough and a second was brought in. There was a room for the English governess, who had not yet moved on, and two rooms for the servants. The apartment was, truth to tell, rather dark, and the dining room got very little daylight, but with its heavy hangings it was very cozy in the evening.
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