He lay there as if paralyzed.
For the first time in his life he was unsure what to do next—and that hurt more than anything. His salvation had always been the certainty that all would turn out well. It was not an assurance born of knowledge or reflection, but an inborn feeling, part of his very being: however bad things are, it’s all for the best! Fair weather will always follow foul! The going may be hard, but we shall struggle through to better days! Thinking so, he had always been at peace with himself. However gloomy the news might be, there was always sunlight in his soul. He could not live in any other way. And if ever his optimism was briefly dented, it was as though he had fallen sick.
But now—he had lost this assurance, and was terrified to think that it might be forever.
He had behaved throughout those last few weeks with unblinking confidence and the results were all bad, all was lost.
His throat contracted as if gripped by pincers.
A sudden pang! Wasn’t there something about suicide somewhere else in the letter? (She’d mentioned it more than once—the thought must be constantly with her.)
He realized that he hadn’t read the letter properly and couldn’t remember all that was in it! He had perused it several times, but its message had not sunk into a mind as heavy as lead, and he had sought refuge in sleep. He must read it again at once!
He had forgotten where the light switch was, and started looking for matches. (Extraordinary: he couldn’t sleep, had lain eating his heart out in the darkness, and yet had not lit a single cigarette. Hadn’t even thought of it.)
He struck a match, switched on the overhead light, and found that he was fully dressed. He had removed only his sword and his boots.
He went over to the table to read the letter again.
How she loved him! “It would be far, far easier to part with life!” And: “This is how you have repaid me for my loyalty, for all my sacrifices. For never betraying you. For surrendering my youth to you. For taking on the role of meek little wife, and making a comfortable home for you to work in. And, now, in return for all that—you betray me?”
Now he had to smoke. One cigarette, then another.
He walked around the room in his stocking feet.
And read on.
“Come to your senses! Why is it only I who have to fight my feelings? Why can’t you fight yours?”
True. He was the stronger. He was the one who should be fighting.
Perhaps their love was not what it had been, but he was responsible for Alina, not she for him.
If they could just get over this shock, the hurt would cease to rankle, they could make peace.
But what of Olda? What did she have in mind? What had she said, what had she been thinking back there? He couldn’t recall. He hadn’t given it a thought.
Now, with the light on, Olda was still harder to see than in the dark.
“To go on living …”
Hopelessly trapped! He was dizzy with self-loathing.
There was no way out.
He felt like a murderer.
There was no time to lose! Must hurry, go at once … One more flare-up, and she might …
She might already have … while her letter was on the way …
“The price of taking that course … would be suicide …”
If she suddenly took it into her head …
Why should Alina be left to struggle alone?
It was true.
In a moment of desperation … you might do anything …
That’s it! I’ll send a telegram to placate her, an affectionate telegram. Make sure she gets it tomorrow morning.
It was still very early, but there was always someone on duty at the telegraph office.
He pulled his boots on quickly.
As he was dressing he caught sight of himself in the wardrobe mirror. He looked old, seedy, lost, bloodshot …
He had lapsed into old age overnight. And felt it. His forties were over.
He went down the hotel corridor, treading softly. The others were still sleeping.
It was dark and damp outside, with a hint of snow that made him shiver. Treacherous weather.
No moon, no stars in the sky. Streetlamps still burning on street corners here and there. All windows were dark. No passersby.
He walked on, hunched up. More like a beaten dog than a soldier. It was impossible to believe that the lighthearted cheerfulness of the day before yesterday would ever return.
Alina just took everything too tragically. Hadn’t he told her, over and over, that he would never leave her? I would never even think of it. Yet she … the very first thing she thought of was to break with him.
No, he wouldn’t be her accomplice in that.
Alina, Alina, I do love you, you know! Just remember that …
Because he was walking, because he was moving into action, it hurt less. Things began to assume normal dimensions, return to their normal course. (Yes. The old lightheartedness was still there somewhere in the corner of his chest, lingering on.)
Walking by the dark monastery wall, with its incrustation of snowedin booths, he found himself passing a broad gate, half open, caught a glimpse of warm light and took a step backward, hesitating …
The gate was open wide, so were the church doors beyond it, and he could see the inner glass doors. Light shone through them, and he could see candles in tall candlesticks. The service had already begun, or was about to begin.
But from where he was not a sound could be heard within, not a soul could be seen, no priest, no monks, no parishioners.
If a service was in progress it seemed to be conducting itself in the middle of the night.
He hesitated. Should he go in, or shouldn’t he?
No, the telegram couldn’t wait, he must hurry.
He strode off toward the telegraph office.
All his life, he had been drawn on by a single purpose, always in a hurry—always as now, striding headlong forward.
[75]
Darkness.
Silence.
But this is not the grave. You are still alive. For one brief moment you lie there forgetful of your grief. Then you are wide awake.
Half a second at most. Then a stab of pain. Remembering what happened last, what happened yesterday. But not just that—the whole series of events, each one a knife wound. And all the time your head is aching, your breast is aching, leaving you helpless. If only you could lie there, remembering nothing. Just resting, listening to the hush, the profound silence all along Arapovskaya Street, all over Tambov. But no—it all comes back, like a tattoo of hammerblows. Yesterday’s letter. A child’s grave. Zhenya’s grave, the Little Rascal’s grave. His last days. You got back too late. From here, from Tambov. The desolate bitterness left by that lovers’ meeting, those two blissful days with no thought of disaster. In this very room?
A little grave in a country graveyard. On a damp autumn day.
And now—he had another woman!
The searing current ran through her brain, along the same grooves again and again, cauterizing … Switch it off! Let go of me!
Why does he write to me like this now?
She fought against it, broke the circuit. Lay there as if in a swoon, a healing sleep, disconnected from the chain of stinging shocks.
But the burning sensation returned. By a roundabout route. As if what she now remembered belonged to another life. Her mother had lain dying, and she had gone into hiding because she was pregnant, and it would be better for mother not to see daughter at all than to see her like that. She had not arrived in time to close her mother’s eyes.
Then, from a third life, something now easily borne, so remote that it no longer rankled—Zhenya’s father.
At the time it had seemed impossibly complicated, an insoluble problem. How could she persuade him to tell his wife? Left to himself he would never have the courage. But why had it seemed so important? She no longer remembered. She had no thought of stealing him, weak and irresolute as h
e was. But the indignity of it choked her—the idea of being an invisible appendage, a thief in the night, not a person in her own right. No, there must be clarity.
Such a weak man. But where were the strong ones? Under nervous strain not one of them was strong. Wasn’t Fyodor just as weak?
Weak! Blind! Hopelessly muddled! Floating like a bit of wood wherever the current carried him. When you were with him you forgave him, because of his naïveté, his emerald eyes, you found yourself wanting to believe in him, to draw him upward, but when you parted—what was there left? A void. And to cap it all, he writes to say …!
Let me go! Switch it off.
She could think of Zhenya’s father calmly now. It was a relief, even. Try to concentrate on him.
She had once seen him as one of those characters whom Chekhov portrayed so faithfully. They were at large everywhere, nice, amiable people who wouldn’t hurt a fly and would never make anything of themselves. Was it angst, or just dreaminess? Eternally seeking—but not striving to find. Satisfied with whatever comes along: life’s like that—make the best of it. (Fyodor was just the same!) It was easy to foresee, right from the beginning, how it would end: he would remain in his shell forever, seeking (but not too eagerly), and only Zinaida herself would be shattered. When he was seeing her off to the country to have her child he had promised to come quickly, to come at once, promised faithfully. And afterward to reorganize his life, for his son’s sake! And he had not been lying, he had meant every word.
But he had not even come to look at his son.
Men’s lives are roomier, easier, they do not even have to try to understand themselves, they feel no need to examine themselves in depth. But a woman’s life is narrow, and she must live in depth.
The other woman too? Was it the same for her? Did she live in depth? If she were only half a woman, wouldn’t she feel the same hurt?
But the Little Rascal was dead!!! Her little boy! Little Zhenya! Before he had time to learn the first thing about the world, before he could distinguish places, or faces, or even the parts of his own body. He had recognized only his mother, and only vaguely. He had struggled out of nonexistence, slept away three-quarters of his time, and promptly returned there. That old-mannish look with which newborn infants survey this inhospitable world had only just left him. His soft hair had only just begun to grow, his head was just assuming a more human shape, the fold in his neck had disappeared … when suddenly his lips turned blue. And he was no more.
“They’ll say”—damn them! For herself Zina had never been in the least afraid of what “they’ll say.” Still, she wasn’t going to risk killing her mother. But hadn’t she given the sick woman a push in that direction by not going to see her? Shouldn’t she at least have gone to the funeral? More “they’ll say.” She shuddered.
Perhaps it was the same for that other woman. Perhaps she was not so much concerned to hold on to her husband as afraid of what “they’ll say.” It could be too much for her to take.
Yet for Fyodor’s sake she had rushed here, braving the disapproval of her sister and brother-in-law, fearlessly inviting him into their home. And here, in the drawing room of their childhood, the drawing room in which he had once been introduced to her family, and she, a high school girl, had gazed in rapturous awe on this former member of the Duma, who had suffered for his principles (!), and was a writer (!), and had twinkling emerald eyes(!) … in that very same drawing room, she had walked around naked at his request while he lay on the sofa lazily looking her over with those same emerald eyes.
It was only three weeks ago, only three weeks, since they had dallied around here shamelessly, while her son was falling sick in Korovainovo!
For six years she had been tantalized, allured, even when she was an unripe girl and far away, by the presentiment that with Fyodor some revelation awaited her. In those two days together with him she had been lost to the world—yet all the time a feeling of emptiness, of disillusionment was growing within her, and as soon as they parted, as soon as she was aboard the train to Kirsanov, it suffused her whole being, all her raptures seemed degrading, all illusion, all dross, and in her revulsion she could not understand why she had ever gone there. She must hurry back to her son! Her anxiety for her abandoned child was excruciating. What if something had happened to him? What if he were ill?
A peasant woman, beside her in the Korovainovo cemetery, had called her own tiny dead child “a piece torn from my womb.”
Torn …
From my …
Womb …
Gone …
I wish I had gone too.
So—now?
So no one had ever seen her secret infant. Neither his father. Nor his … stepfather? There had not been time. It was as though he had never lived, except in his mother’s memory. There wasn’t even a photograph. Nothing to show anyone, ever.
Was that what she had wanted? To keep him hidden? “Stepfather”! He had scattered and abandoned children of his own, lovelessly—he himself probably didn’t know where. He had made only one of them an exception and adopted him. What inferior creatures men were, if they could not even love their own children.
But supposing they had had a child of their own? Surely she would have won him over, endeared it to him?
On the train to Kirsanov she had been desperate: it had only just begun—and it was all over. It could not go on! Over as soon as begun—and nothing left to remember! He was hopelessly coarse-grained, primitive, incapable of understanding higher things. Over the years his letters had been so many cruel lessons to her, he wrote gratuitously about other women, tried to put her off, rapped her fingers to break her hold on him, and she had thought it was all just a rough game, could not believe that he cared nothing for her, that he might write her off at any moment, that he meant every word when he said that as far as women were concerned he did not pick and choose, he was content with those who cost least to woo, he wasted no effort on conquest, but let no opportunity slip … And still she remembered his radiant smile, his endearing shyness in literature classes, she had always believed that he had a soul, dormant it was true, but needing only to be cleansed, needing only the help of a woman’s hand, and his front-row pupil was perfectly capable of providing that! For six years she had been true as a compass needle amidst his sordid revelations, believed that it was all a pose, that beneath the surface there was some hidden treasure, as yet unmined, known to no one. He was cynically frank because he had never known what it was to be loved.
How her hopes had soared, how she had exulted, when she found that he could rise above jealousy of another man’s child!
And then they were alone together, in each other’s arms. And … and it was as if none of it had ever happened.
In fact, she had always been afraid of getting to know him more closely. Eager to—and afraid to …
Before she got back to her son, before she was told about his illness, she was already in despair, already full of revulsion—determined never to meet Fyodor again, perhaps not even to write to him.
EMPTINESS!
Emptiness! Zhenya could have lived, filled her life with his own, but now there was nothing but emptiness! A vacuum never to be filled by any other human being, any other child! That being would never exist again on this earth. A life that never was, that would remain a mirage, a life linked with, intersected by, no other.
She had not wanted to write to him anyway. But when Little Rascal vanished everything had gone dark, and she was dumbstruck. What could she write to him? There would be no miracle.
Such treachery: abandoning a helpless little boy, so that by herself she could …
But there was a second and worse betrayal: under that very roof, in that same empty house, listening to that very clock striking, to be thinking of him now, burning for him again, when she should be thinking only of Zhenya.
Unexpectedly, and unthinkingly, she had found herself drawn by her son’s death to the church. It was a path she had never once taken in her yo
ung days. Now, it was as if she had been going there all her life. The peasant women who were her neighbors had stood so unobtrusively around the little coffin. They had carried it to the cemetery.
But to stay on in Korovainovo after the funeral and until the ninth-day service would have been too much for her. She abandoned his lonely grave, lonely forever now, since it was his destiny to remain forever in the Korovainovo cemetery, and rushed off to see her aunt in the Convent of the Ascension at Tambov.
Her aunt had told her to come at any time: if anything goes wrong, come and see me. But all she ever had to offer was the promise of solace in the world to come, none of it had anything to do with the turmoil of life here and now. Zinaida would answer her rudely. Forget it, Auntie, God the Comforter is an absurdity. Why go to such trouble to create a world which was going to need consoling?
Now, though, she had found that it was all very simple, and that this solace was very much needed, like fragrant pitch cooling to fill deep ruts and smooth over sharp stones. It was with her aunt that Zinaida began to recover her balance.
Instead of brooding over the future she could no longer look forward to with her son, she asked herself: Where was he now? That he was nowhere was unthinkable: to have lived only a little while could not be the same as never having been conceived.
My … womb … torn from …
Then she had come across Father Aloni in the church at nearby Utkino—a kindly priest, serious-minded as simple Russian people generally are, broad-shouldered and benevolent. After conducting the ninth-day service he had talked to Zinaida at length, and with serene ease. After which her equilibrium was even more secure.
Zina had of old defended the Church against the “progressives,” even when she was an unbeliever. Just to be contrary.
Now that she had recovered her equilibrium and was thinking more calmly Zina had found the strength and the equanimity to write to Fyodor about the death of her son. Perhaps this was how her recovery could begin. But she was not to reach the twice-ninth day without shocks. Yesterday, like a bolt out of the blue, she had received his letter. It had passed hers in the mail—otherwise he would not have written it. You should know, he wrote, that I have someone else, and that it is serious.
November 1916 Page 150