In his dream he had not been able to see his unknown visitor’s features clearly, but Olda’s, seen in broad daylight, seemed just right, and just as attractive. He liked all those toys too—toys not for children, but for herself. (And it pleased him that she hardly ever thought fit to mention children, as if they were invisible from the heights on which she dwelled.) She spoke disdainfully of most women. But with almost childish enthusiasm about nestlings, and animals generally. On Kamenny Ostrov she dragged Georgi back a hundred yards to take a second look at a kitten he hadn’t seen properly. Even the professor’s belief in astrology, fortune-telling, and good and bad luck signs somehow did not seem incongruous. If Olda dropped some precious object she would silently hug it to her breast—for luck—before replacing it. And he loved the way she sat beside him, with her legs tucked underneath her, gently swaying, and reciting, in a low voice, devoid now of passion but promising its renewal, verse after verse of some fashionable poet or other:
“From you, world-weary Anatomist,
I have learned how sweet evil can be.”
Or else she would tell him about something called theurgic art. There was a lot of nonsense in what she said, but Georgi was enchanted by it all—by Olda’s favorite pose, her musical voice tirelessly holding forth, being able to hug and touch her while he was listening.
Sometimes they got up and dressed to eat, sometimes Olda would hop out, put on a dressing gown, open or close the curtains, and run, run, run to bring a snack back to bed. They were never apart for long. The sweetest, laziest time was watching light change to darkness, or darkness give way to light. Lying happily in bed engulfed in the flow of time. Most of what they later remembered saying had been said lying down.
But once, at the end of the day, the clouds parted, blue sky showed through the gray, and they went for a long walk. They came across a boatman on the embankment and he ferried them across to Kamenny Ostrov.
It was cold, there was frost in the air, but the sun shone occasionally. Westward the sky had cleared and for Georgi it was as if there was an infinity of light within him. How wonderful it was to be with Olda! They took a closer look at those villas—the one ornamented with roosters, the one with the black turrets, the Swiss chalet. Wind and rain had not yet stripped everything bare, some red-leaved trees, and of course the dark brown oaks, always the latest, had held their own. The Krestovka, sluggish in the cold and hidden under a thick coverlet of leaves, looked as though you could walk across it. Villas, villas, and more villas—wooden villas, with mismatched windows, with spires, with carved woodwork, with pediments like peasant bonnets, with little balconies. By the Elagin Bridge stood the Kamenny Ostrov Theater, an ornate wooden building, now deserted and boarded up. The pathways were firm underfoot, but there was mud to either side of them.
“Do you ever come walking here?”
“I’ve been known to do so.”
He felt no inclination to ask when and with whom. He was content with what he saw and could hold.
“We … I lived in Petersburg six years,” he said regretfully, “and was hardly ever on the islands. Never had time. Anyway, it’s a place for strollers … and we weren’t… I wasn’t much of a stroller.”
He had corrected himself, not wanting to mention Alina. Though it was no secret that she had been with him in Petersburg, this was not the place to speak of it. But Olda seized her opportunity and gently inserted a sharp claw.
“Did you get on well together?”
What possible answer was there?
She spelled it out.
“Were you friends? Did you understand each other?”
He had to say yes. Blushing.
“You’re not,” Olda decided, “the sort of person who thinks a great deal about his life and tries to understand himself. But understanding yourself is absolutely essential.”
Though not particularly eager to talk politics, Georgi needed to change the subject.
“Tell me,” he asked, “is Milyukov really a major historian?”
“How could he be?” Olda answered irritably. “He switched from scholarship to opposition politics very early on, and has rolled and rattled down the easy road ever since. He makes a display of learning, but is not genuinely learned. He has no powerful ideas of his own, and no soul, but he has a great deal of tenacity. Poetically speaking, he’s the barren fig tree that …”
She interrupted herself to throw both arms around him so that he would see the young moon—already into its first quarter—over his right, not his left shoulder.
Georgi saw the brilliant sickle in the west and said, “It doesn’t count if you’re made to look.”
But all these happy days had taken him into a new month. And he had missed Guchkov altogether.
They walked along the northern embankment, on a simple wooden landing stage, where the cold black waters of the Neva came almost up to their feet.
He began questioning her again about the Kadets, and she answered halfheartedly, as though it was all common knowledge.
“None of them feel any responsibility to the deeper realities of Russian history. It never occurs to them that they do not understand this people’s faith, nor its peculiar conception of right and wrong, nor where the main dangers to the national character lie. They boldly assert that ‘the people wants this’ and ‘the people demands that.’ But nowhere in Western Europe are radicals so contemptuous of their country’s history. If the Kadets had any feeling for our history they would see the war through to the end without a ‘responsible government.’ ”
She looked at him meaningfully in the gathering darkness. She was trying to guess what he was thinking—"see the war through” was meant for him.
“The right-wing thinkers are all discredited in advance and the students won’t come near them. So there’s nowhere for them to discover a different point of view.”
They turned back over the Kamenny Ostrov bridge by lamplight and made their way home. Had they really been walking for nearly three hours, with other people around, instead of staying, just the two of them, in Olda’s room? Now they wanted warmth and comfort and the phonograph. Under the moon they had agreed that enough was enough. So Georgi sat in an armchair, telling her how he had once behaved rashly at the front and got away with it. Suddenly—a green flash from Olda’s eyes, she sat in his lap, snuggling up to him, whispered one short word in his ear—and their vow of abstinence was shattered.
Time sped by, deliriously compressed.
Then flowed smoothly, slowly again.
The wonder of it.
At peace, triumphant.
If there had been no other indications, the way in which Olda at just the right moment tensed her foot against the floor and sprang nimbly into his arms was enough to show that he was not the first to sweep her off her feet. But his awareness that she was experienced and versatile did not upset him in the least, indeed it pleased him: a late guest cannot be upset to find that others have feasted before him, and is flattered when they hasten to serve him as if he were first at the table. He felt no jealous urge to inquire about his predecessor (or predecessors). They meant no more to him than he did to them. He never asked why she was not married, and whether there was anybody now. She did once remark that divorce had become very common in Petersburg and Moscow lately, that in many marriages one of the partners had previously been divorced, and that Anna Karenina would not need to throw herself under a train nowadays but would get a divorce from a consistory court with no fuss, and marry Vronsky. Georgi listened, and was left wondering: was she divorced? He abandoned himself delightedly to her practiced skills, and if someone else had helped her to acquire them—he was grateful. They could not possibly estrange Olda from him now.
She did, more than once, start telling him about her past, and even about a husband of some sort, though not one to whom she was officially married, but Georgi lost interest before he could get to the bottom of it. Just one of those uninteresting, stereotyped “stories of my life” which everybod
y was always telling everybody else.
He was still less concerned with her private thoughts as she lay there, eyes tightly closed, spent and speechless. Blissful gratitude to this woman drowned all other feelings. His rampant emotions were like a mountain range beyond which he could not see, and had no wish to see, any other world.
Olda, though, was eager to know more about Georgi’s previous love affairs. He reluctantly submitted, started telling her, and at once discovered that there was hardly anything to tell: the few stories he could think of passed like pathetic shadows over that bed of fire. Ashamed of himself, he gave up, there were better things for lips to be doing anyway. Those liaisons were sporadic, haphazard, and left no impression on his mind or his feelings.
In reality Alina had been the only one.
“But was it like this with her?”
“No, never.”
Olda tried to draw him out. “Go on, tell me about it.”
But what was there to tell? He wouldn’t know how to put it. That was then—this is now. There were ten thousand little things—how could he talk about it?
“Is she clever?”
She certainly wasn’t stupid. But not what you’d call particularly clever.
“Does she love you?”
“Of course, what a question.”
Olda lay, head high, her brown hair, out of curl, straying untidily over a plumped-up pillow, staring sternly not at Georgi but at the top of the wall.
“And is she devoted? To your career?”
Georgi would have liked to say yes, but … “Well, it isn’t really a woman’s thing … Not her sort of thing …”
Olda had spoken emphatically, as if she did not quite trust him to answer truthfully.
How could he make her understand? It wouldn’t fit any logical framework. The things that mattered most would be missing: that he was used to Alina and felt close to her, that they had been through so much together and that their relationship was all the stronger for it. At one time he had thought that Alina shared his commitment, the whole tempo of his life, his sense of predestination. Then it turned out that she put up with it all expecting to be rewarded with a more carefree existence. Well—she was what she was. And all the responsibility rested on her husband’s shoulders.
(A husband who couldn’t even read her letters? … Yes, but no real contradiction there.)
“And do you love her?” Olda for some reason didn’t believe it. Her eyes were still fixed on the wall.
“Of course!”
Olda obviously couldn’t get it into her head that the two situations—herself and himself here, his life with Alina elsewhere—had no relevance to each other. There he lay, on his back like her, smiling a little at his vision of himself lying there, loved by both of them, by each in her own way—and neither relationship could interfere with the other. His happiness was complete, and he felt too indolent to continue the conversation.
“Would you ever think of putting it to the test?” Olda asked half jokingly.
“What for?”
She smiled. “To make sure. General rules are no help at all in personal decisions. Every case is uniquely labyrinthine. There are no problems on earth more difficult than one’s own emotional problems.”
“Come, now,” Vorotyntsev said, good-humoredly deprecating. “And you a historian! What about the problems of a colossus like Russia?”
“Not to be compared!” she said, and her long eyebrows were a stern straight line over her small features. “Those are problems like mountain peaks, visible from afar, and to many people. Hundreds and thousands of us have an equal right to an opinion on them, and some conclusion can be drawn. But in matters of personal feeling advice from outsiders is inevitably superficial, and no two people will take the same view.”
Not so. Vorotyntsev firmly believed that people mature enough to manage affairs of state—and, more difficult still, to carry their fellows with them—were few and far between. Whereas almost everybody on earth succeeded in managing his family. Nothing could be simpler, and it was no one else’s concern. He firmly believed it—but in his state of contented repletion he was not going to argue. Whatever she said suited him because she was saying it. Let’s leave it at that.
But she was not satisfied. She drew up her slender, girlish legs, her favorite pose, dressed or undressed, hoisted herself higher on the pillow, covered her bare shoulders with the counterpane, and said, “What’s more, my dear, one must be incomparably firmer and more resolute in matters of the heart than in matters of state.”
“Wha-a-at?”
He was speechless.
She looked at him mockingly, but with a hint of compassion.
“Heaven forbid that you should ever discover how difficult it is. You’re in such perfect agreement with yourself, there are no moot questions for you.”
She sighed.
“Your new feeling still isn’t strong enough.”
But what was so special and so marvelous about these conversations in bed was that words were not necessarily followed by more words. Her voice sank.
She slid down from the pillow.
It was late, he was sleepy and his ears could not quite catch what she was mumbling under the counterpane.
“What are you saying?”
A voice from below: “You needn’t listen, I’m not talking to you.”
They should have been asleep long ago. They hadn’t had a single good night’s sleep, but they persisted in this drowsy, semiconscious, after-midnight byplay until it reawakened the tempest and Olda, heedless of the nighttime silence, cried out in a piercing voice, the voice of an intrepid huntress.
[30]
“You’re doomed!” Nusya used to say. “You’ll drop dead in harness.”
Pyotr Akimovich knew it. And was willing.
He had long ago gotten used to the extraordinary rule that in a country with so many people there were never enough for what needed to be done. So that his own life was stretched to the breaking point, to deal with the expected and the unexpected, and he had learned to accept all these assignments gladly.
Russia’s mineral wealth was inexhaustible, and there was a shortage of expertise in the mines as in other branches of Russian industry, but the war had diverted Obodovsky from his normal occupation. Knowing that Russia’s future economic might depended on them, Obodovsky saw those invisible deposits, was aware of them as most people see the gaily shimmering greenery on the earth’s surface. But now there was something else to be done before this subterranean wealth could be tapped—the ground above it had to be saved from the enemy. And so the war was gradually converting this mining engineer into an organizer of other engineering enterprises.
In any case, his passion and his talent for organization had perhaps always come first with Obodovsky. He had realized long ago that good management could double the output of a pit and—so it seemed—triple the carrying capacity of a railroad. Which was why he had been asked by the All-Russian Union of Engineers to form a Subcommittee for Military-Technical Aid, attached to Guchkov’s Central War Industry Committee, and was inexorably doomed to become its chairman. This meant that he had to immerse himself in the uncongenial study of military technology, and spend his evenings perusing an endless succession of manuals and monographs.
War on a gigantic scale had brought about such a chaotic proliferation of work in the rear that there was no knowing where you might have to exert yourself next. Today, Friday, 3 November, Obodovsky had been sitting since early morning in one of the poky little rooms of the War Industry Committee, in the depths of No. 59 Nevsky Prospect, interviewing artillery engineers, some of whom were also inventors. The number of those eagerly seeking assistance here after unfortunate experiences with the War Ministry was steadily growing. And you couldn’t just brush them off. There might be a diamond among them.
There are few categories of people so difficult to judge as inventors—to decide who is the genius, who the lunatic, who the luckless man of talent, who the
trickster. You can know all there is to know in a particular field (Obodovsky certainly didn’t know all that much about artillery) and still find it hard not to quail, faced, amid the mists of the unknown, with that fanatical determination, those feverish eyes glowing perhaps with triple vision, seeing farther than you ever could, or perhaps just with the light of madness or the lust for money and fame (neither of which, however, comes the way of Russian inventors). What helped was not so much the extent of your knowledge but having the mentality of an engineer. You could distinguish your own kind from the others.
Obodovsky was conducting the interviews, but without an assumed official manner, without self-importance. Only their positions in relation to a desk lamp under an opaque white shade, and an inkstand, made it possible to distinguish interviewer from applicant.
Kisnemsky was agitated, his tie was awry and his shirt collar turned up, but there was no doubt about him, his previous inventions had proved that he was genuine. He had been unsuccessful with a type of “progressive” gunpowder, and had roped in and brought along a quiet and malleable engineer from the Tambov powder factory whom he had already persuaded to continue the tests.
The progressive gunpowder problem was a by-product of the need for long-range shells. Before the war no one had thought of firing farther than six versts: decisive engagements were not fought in greater depth than that, and as yet there were no means of observing explosions at a greater distance. But over the last year trench warfare had made necessary a range of up to fifteen versts (and aerial observation, already carried out by the Germans, made that possible), as urgently necessary as all the other drastic changes which this extraordinary European war called for, so urgently that if there was no time to design new ones the only thing to do was to increase the range of existing guns. But how? By digging a hole under the trail of the gun carriage, so as to widen the angle of elevation? That added thirty percent to the range, but reduced velocity, and lengthened the time needed to prepare the gun for firing. Obviously, the muzzle velocity of the shell itself must be increased. But how? By increasing the explosive charge? The barrel of the gun was not strong enough to withstand the additional pressure, and the gun carriages wouldn’t hold up under the recoil. So they started looking for “progressive” varieties of explosive. Ordinary gunpowder burns out instantly, the shell is launched by a single impulse, and the pressure behind it decreases as it moves along the barrel. Progressive gunpowder must be made to burn in such a way that the quantity of gas would increase progressively every thousandth of a second, which would mean that the pressure on the base of the shell would not decrease, and that on the walls of the barrel would not increase. So, by some as yet unobvious method, you had to devise a compromise between the laws of geometry and the laws of combustion which would tell you what the shape of the grains of powder should be.
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