He had come out for half an hour, and it was already time to return. Or had he said an hour? Time to go back, anyway. But he walked on.
The road curved around the spruce forest and came out at the station. A pleasant surprise! He had imagined himself bottled up in the guesthouse, completely immobilized—and now …
He seized a telegram form, quickly wrote in the address—General Svechin, GHQ, Mogilev—and felt himself a soldier again.
The message read: “telegraph Moscow address officially summoning urgently Yegor.”
Otherwise it seemed likely that there would be no getting away from Moscow either.
An abrupt about-face and back to the guesthouse. Too late, he thought, “What about Olda? Why didn’t I telegraph her?” He still wasn’t used to the idea that every telegraph office, every post office linked him with Olda, Olda was there for him! (He had, however, found time on his last evening in Petrograd to ring her and tell her that he was going via Mogilev and she could write to him there.)
Yes, Olda was there but her image seemed to have dimmed in those last four days, to have receded into the far distance. He no longer felt that hot current in the middle of his breast, that wave emanating from her. It cost him an effort to remember her vividly. With her he was an entirely new man. But others insisted that he should be as before.
The wind had blown away the stale feeling stagnating in him, and Georgi returned patiently, in a mood to talk to Alina as gently and lovingly as he possibly could.
But the landlady, whom Alina had rudely rebuked for her out-of-tune piano, intercepted him on the ground floor and said, “Your wife is very poorly!”
He had forgotten the threat she had made that morning, but now it came back to him like a blow on the head.
He took the stairs two at a time, rushed along the corridor like a whirlwind, found the door open, and a maidservant by Alina’s bed, who said, “She’s a little better now.”
Alina was lying on her back, pale, fully dressed, but with her collar undone. She had a hot-water bottle under each hand, and another at her feet.
It was a heart attack. The guest in the next room but one was a doctor, and he had examined her. She was well enough now for him to leave.
The maidservant also left the room.
Georgi dropped his fur hat on the floor and knelt at his wife’s bedside.
“Alina, darling! What is it? What happened?”
He caressed her hand, her shoulder, her forehead.
She looked pale, bloodless. And she still had difficulty in speaking.
“Don’t think that I wanted to … It just came over me … like ants running over my shoulders, my arms, and my hands started getting numb. I tried to write you a note. But I couldn’t finish it, I collapsed …”
It was there on the table, a note on a scrap of hotel paper, written with a blunt pencil that doubled every stroke. Every letter was deformed, as though writhing in pain, her numb fingers had struggled to produce the least little mark, nothing could have been less like Alina’s proud, bold hand.
“Georgi, dear,” he read, “I feel very poorly. You mustn’t think that I wanted …”
She had thought that she was dying. And had been in a hurry to write, telling him not to think that she …
My precious one! My touching little wife!
He quickly slipped off his greatcoat and went back to sit on the edge of her bed.
“Have they given you any medicine?” (She nodded, with a look of childlike contentment.) “Are you feeling better now?” (Another nod. Glad that someone was taking notice of her, looking after her.)
“My poor girl!”
He stroked her hair back from her forehead.
“I’ll never leave you, don’t even think it! I never had any intention of leaving you.”
His heart was wrung. He had never felt such pity. And such warm affection. My poor darling, I was almost the death of you!
Alina lay there with a soft light in her eyes, looking almost happy.
[58]
Later she was her bright self again. She readily agreed to return to the city. On the way back she was subdued and absentminded.
But as they drew into the station she suddenly clouded over. “I don’t want to go home!” she said. “I can’t go home.”
She began shuddering violently. Tremors of anxiety ran obliquely across her cheeks and her brow.
Was she afraid that crossing the threshold of that familiar apartment would be too much of a shock? She could not carry her present hard-won equilibrium safely across the threshold of her everyday existence: something would collapse in ruins. The contrast between her old surroundings and her new circumstances would be too great. That was understandable. But what was to be done? Georgi could not get stuck there forever for the sake of marital harmony.
He himself did not find crossing the threshold of his home at all difficult. On the contrary, he was eager to get there—just for once in the course of this pointless excursion to do what he liked best, sit at home, rummage in the desk drawers he was so fond of, find little things he had just thought of. It was evidently not to be. He was denied his own home, his treasure, as if a spell had been cast over it.
Perhaps he should set out for Mogilev that evening? No, it was obviously unthinkable to leave Alina alone. He wondered whether she would let him go the next day. His only hope was that telegram from Svechin.
A fine mess he had landed himself in, and he saw no way of extricating himself.
But the tremors running over his wife’s face told him that they could not possibly spend the evening at home without some sort of explosion. With Alina in her present state it would be like carrying a grenade at your side with the pin removed. Better, even, to kill time in the Daisy patisserie, two steps from home.
Suddenly an idea. Passing through Moscow two weeks earlier, he had run into Lieutenant Colonel Smyslovsky on Ostozhenka Street. Smyslovsky, himself an artillery officer, had been at Usdau with Vorotyntsev, had been wounded, and was now living in Moscow. He had invited Vorotyntsev to visit him. He lived, with a whole nest of Smyslovskys, not far away, on Bolshoi Afanasiev Street. What might otherwise be a sticky evening could be spent there. They could drop in at home briefly, to change.
Alina brightened up again, grateful to her husband for this respite. She was once again the docile, painfully thin little girl she had become in these last few enchanted days.
Vsevolod Smyslovsky’s answer when Vorotyntsev rang him was affirmative: he was at home, he would be glad to see them, one of his brothers, Aleksei, who had just arrived from the front, would also be there, and Sunday was a particularly convenient day.
Yes, of course, it was Sunday! In the vacuum of the guesthouse the Vorotyntsevs had lost track of the days.
Alina put on her best shoes, silk over fine leather, a red-and-white frock, and a brooch suitable for the company: a small enameled copy of an officer’s epaulet.
The Smyslovskys lived near Sivtsev Vrazhek, directly opposite the little church of St. Athanasius and St. Cyril, with its un-Russian portico and columns, all on a small scale. Its apse backed onto Filippovsky Lane. They occupied a spacious eight-room apartment on the raised ground floor of an old building, with windows looking out on one side on quiet Bolshoi Afanasiev Street and on the other facing the courtyard. In this apartment, a long time ago now, their father had died, their mother had passed away quietly in her sleep, and all seven children had grown up. The four who were unmarried lived there still and the others came visiting, bringing their grandchildren. There were distinct strata of furniture deposited by several generations, all of it respected not for unity of style, as in the house of latter-day lawyers and other nouveaux riches, nor because of its usefulness to the present occupants, but simply for old times’ sake—it had always stood exactly where it stood now.
There were many such apartments on Moscow side streets. The one surprise was the composition of the household. Not one married couple, not a single child, just a spins
ter sister and three bachelor brothers younger than herself, but not at all young. Since their father, the headmaster of an academy for young gentlemen, had been a mathematician, all five sons had chosen to study his subject, but, after leaving the 1st Cadet Corps in Moscow, had, like Vorotyntsev, made amends for their father’s departure from the family’s military tradition and entered the Mikhail Artillery School in Petersburg. Only Pavel had then chosen not to serve as an artillery officer but to teach mathematics in the Aleksandr Institute, which meant so much to Vorotyntsev. The other four were all well known in the army. Evgeni, in fact, was a lieutenant general, and the inventor of a new type of field gun.
The Vorotyntsevs were received by the youngest, Vsevolod, limping from his wound (the wound itself had not been very serious, but it had reopened twice and refused to heal), and by Elizaveta, who was over fifty and the oldest of the family. She already had a visitor, a university student, a young lady who, however, treated the elderly teacher very much as an equal, and turned out to be not a former pupil of hers but a fellow teacher in a free school for workers. Elizaveta Konstantinovna had spent her whole life teaching, anybody, anywhere—the children of the poor, neighbors’ children, nephews, grandchildren, draymen, and most recently factory workers. This was perhaps not the most interesting company for Alina just now, but as long as there were several new faces and the evening passed without incident …
As the Vorotyntsevs arrived, the student was heatedly describing the campaign against Professor Modestov, Deputy Rector, and, in his person, the police regime which was gradually being established at the university. A week earlier a student named Manotskov had been expelled. His call-up papers were not in order, and they had made this an excuse to harass him. But after his expulsion he often slipped into the university to attend student meetings. When Blagov, the porter at the Chemical Institute, a bullying sergeant-major type, high-handedly took their entrance permits away from three of those who were scheduled to speak, Manotskov charged at him heroically, seized him by his shirtfront, shook him, and took the permits from him! Since then Manotskov had been a hunted man. Every possible excuse was used to trap him. And Deputy Rector Modestov, flouting the constitution, academic freedom, and the universal canons of morality, had seen fit, with his own hand, to remove Manotskov’s overcoat from its peg in order to search the pockets and determine who owned it!
Elizaveta Konstantinovna shook her head and closed her eyes in horror, reluctant to believe that a person could take another persons coat from its peg. Look what an autocratic system without checks and balances can lead to!
As when he was listening to Engineer Dmitriev’s account of the riot on the Vyborg side, what struck Vorotyntsev was not so much the event itself as the vastness, the inexhaustibility of Russia: wherever you went, however many thousands of versts you covered, every place had its own particular crowds, its own unique worries, its own reasons for rebellion.
They sat at the oak dining table and a bowl of apples was produced. Vorotyntsev was happy to see Alina take an apple, peel it with her knife, and cut little pieces from it. Thank God, she had eaten nothing since morning, she’d been living on air. Things would somehow gradually settle down, fade into the background.
The students had been so furious with Modestov after this that they vowed to get him dismissed. The next time he broke the rules—by entering the lecture room during the break wearing an overcoat and galoshes—the whole student body rose in spontaneous protest. Medical students in the senior classes voted for a general strike—until Modestov was removed! They raced around lecture rooms to bring other students out. They were generally successful; most students showed political awareness and solidarity. They were, however, unable to break through into the Law Faculty building: the porters had locked all the doors. But the most outrageous event occurred in the History Faculty: Professor Speransky refused to interrupt his lecture and simply expelled the invading students from the room. More scandalous still, Professor Chelpanov’s students themselves drove the agitators out, shouting such things as “We don’t want to grow up to be idiots!” And this in the History Faculty, where you’d think social problems would be of more immediate concern than anywhere else! The spineless mass had succumbed to the influence of the students from the aristocracy.
Vorotyntsev burst out laughing, but glanced at Alina and restrained himself, so as not to hurt her feelings. He visualized the irate professor stepping to the edge of his platform and raising his little finger, at which the rebels, daunted by his courage, retreated, backed out of the room, stepping on each other’s toes, and closed the door behind them. A truly martial moment! All that stuff about the power of the crowd was a fairy tale: the crowd is always weak because there is no unity of hearts and minds, no one wants to be the first to sacrifice himself. Nothing in the world is stronger than the spirit of a single human being: if it resolves to sacrifice itself it can stand firm without fear of cracking. This was not a story about bravery in battle, but as a rule educated people were more cowardly when confronted by left-wing loudmouths than in face of machine guns.
There was worse to come. Students who had reached the age of twenty-one were to be drafted into the army by lot. And just recently an unauthorized student meeting had been raided and hectographed copies of speeches by Kerensky and Chkheidze, pictures of Zhelyabov and Gertsenshtein, and pamphlets on “War and the Tasks of Social Democracy” had been confiscated. The two students most deeply implicated had been banished!
“To Siberia?” cried Elizaveta Konstantinovna.
“From the Moscow province! They have been cut off from their alma mater!”
Vorotyntsev was curious. “Forgive me,” he said, “but what are the tasks of Social Democracy with regard to the war?” He truly did not know.
The student looked at him scornfully. “Everybody knows that,” she said. “If you still don’t …”
This gate-crashing colonel had ruined the atmosphere.
She went on to describe how there had recently been a tremendous scuffle in the Assembly Hall, and several students with monarchist sympathies had been beaten up.
After which she took her leave.
Every minute that passed eased the stifling pressure that had built up around the guesthouse and the pool, when there were just the two of them and the whole world was compressed into that little space. Sitting there among the others, Alina was her old self, without that eerie look of renunciation on her face. She asked, with normal feminine curiosity, how such an unusual household was managed.
(That’s it, Alina dear, hang in there!)
The answer was a surprise. Although they had a cook and a maid, and the Smyslovsky brothers’ orderlies gave a hand, the family was unusual in that boys and girls alike had been able to cook from an early age, and the brothers in fact were more expert than their sister. If they ate in some restaurant and liked a specialty of the house, instead of following the usual practice and buying the chef’s secret, they analyzed the dish with their eyes and their palates, and when they got home one of the brothers would have worked out how to prepare the dish just as well.
The guests smiled.
“That’s not all. Aleksei is a baker too.”
The colonel? Was it possible?
Well, he had had one of Filippov’s bakers assigned to his brigade, to teach his men to bake black bread, and had taken the opportunity to learn himself. Aleksei was extraordinarily talented, he could pick up any craft.
Vsevolod limped in with a decanter and canapés. From the first words he and Vorotyntsev had exchanged each of them had recognized that the other was genuine and that, belonging as they both did to such a different world, neither of them was really at ease sitting around in a Moscow apartment. Such men had no need to beat about the bush. It was easy for them to talk about what was uppermost in their memories. They could leave sentences unfinished: Yes, I know just what you mean—here’s to you.
But Georgi was still concerned for Alina. He kept half an eye on her as sh
e left the room with their hostess and shortly returned. The situation was precarious. Nothing really interested her.
Pavel came out into the dining room. His health was poor (chest trouble).
“Social problems” crept into the conversation again over tea, but Vorotyntsev had had more than enough of that in Petrograd. At least the talking there was done by those who had to deal with things, whereas here it was endless expressions of sympathy for all that was progressive and endless condemnation of the government.
An old gentry family. All the men were officers. And yet …
Vorotyntsev did not know Aleksei Smyslovsky, but had seen his wife, the beautiful Elena Nikolaevna, daughter of General Malakhov, commander of the Moscow Military District, on several occasions. She looked Japanese, and liked to emphasize the resemblance—in the pattern embroidered on her dress and by wearing kimono sleeves, or at fancy-dress balls appearing in full Japanese costume. He had been looking forward to seeing her again.
But Aleksei arrived, or rather burst in, without his wife. Charged in like a schoolboy home for the holidays, rather than a balding, fiftyish colonel, hurriedly embraced them all in turn, including Vorotyntsev when they were introduced (“Heard a lot about you”), and prevented himself only just in time from embracing Alina. He was below average height, had a long, wispy gray beard like a fairy-tale wizard, and joyously shining eyes. He inspected them all eagerly, then the room, to see if all the objects were where they should be, asked his sister whether this, that, or the other was still around …
“Even the rats’ trapezes are still there in the pantry,” his sister said. She couldn’t suppress a smile, which greatly softened her stern features.
Aleksei, it seemed, was seized by fits of enthusiasm like summer squalls, violent while they lasted, but short-lived. He had once had a passion for white rats, and had set up cages for them in his room, with runs, and trapezes for them to swing on. The passion evaporated, he forgot the rats, and one by one they died. But this was only one of his crazes. He had taken up bookbinding and photography. Even petit point—and he was not in the least embarrassed when people laughed. “It’s not one of the heavier trades. And suppose I land in jail one of these days?”
November 1916 Page 112